Ask Rezzz

I don't know about you, but I'm constantly bombarded with ideas on making this, and creating that. Thinking that the product will help diversify my revenue and make my business more stable.

I'm not wrong. And I don't say that because I'm arrogant. I say that be it is a fact.

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Not everyone wants to create a product, I don't. I'm not looking to build a software product. I'm not looking to create some physical thing to sell.

What I enjoy is creating a solution, building services, publishing content that help others solve a problem.

To me, what I want is a productized service.

Creating a productized service is creating a menu for potential clients to order off of.

It doesn't even have to be something that's complex and automated. But it needs to be profitable for you.

## What does everyone hire you for?

Simply start with what people hire you for in the first place. If you are a designer, what is the one thing that you do for each and every single client. Same goes for developers.

Do you perform audits? Do you do brand identities? Do you setup coding environments?

What do repeat customers hire you for?

This is what I call "chronic pain points". Are your clients seasonal and always come back to you for something at the same time each year? Do you have to design social media assets for new content? Are you building iterations of software for new features?

After you work through these things, look at the lists. Pick out ones that have a similar theme.

You want these things to be small enough to achieve quick wins for your clients.

They also need be delivered quickly and profitably.

Since they are small and you may be doing a number of them, make sure that you can enjoy doing them as well.

How have you helped brand new clients get over nervousness and apprehension?

This is key, because ultimately the goal of a productize service is to make it simple and easy to work with you. By reducing the number of choices a lead has and creating an easy option, you make the decision for them.

Building a website or designing a brand that has an investment of $20,000 and 3 months of time is scary for some businesses who have never been down that road before.

However, delivering brand style guide that may take you a few weeks and $5,000 to do is easier to digest.

Then once they see that deliverable and how the relationship was successful with this engagement, the client is now more comfortable with you to move forward with the much larger project.

Yes, productizing a service is not easy. But if you think of it like creating a menu for your business so that leads can order from, it'll create that diversity you are looking for.

A little bonus tip...you don't even need to tell anyone that you do this either. Especially when starting out. Use is as a tool in your sales conversations. If budget or time is an issue for the lead, then offer your productize service to them.

If they seem like someone you may not want to work with but like what their business is about, offer them your productize service.

Use is as a tool to try them out, just as they would use it to try you out too.

Last week you learned [how to review your sales process]([https://rezzz.com/ask/how-to-review-your-sales-process/](https://rezzz.com/ask/how-to-review-your-sales-process/)), just as important as that is, so to you should be reviewing each and every project that comes through your business.

Ever feel like you finished a project and felt like the weight of the world lifted up off your shoulders. Suddenly you have this sense of relief that is so strong you wonder how you got sucked into that mess in the first place?

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It's so easy to get sucked into the excitement of a brand new project. Being able to see an opportunity and hear about how you can solve someone else's problem simply from your skillset is the high we all get at the beginning.

Just like getting drunk though, this high clouds judgment. It also clouds your awareness of subtle signals that are indicators that maybe this project isn't a right fit for your business.

It actually hinders our instincts to "know better" especially from past experiences.

You want to hone those instincts and make them so strong that the high only happens after your instincts, your gut, tells you it's ok.

Questions to ask after a project is over

Once a project is over, you should sit down for 15-30 minutes and digest everything.

Ask yourself 5 questions.

1. How do I feel now that the project is completed?
2. Did this work help me reach my goals?
3. What problems did I face that I didn't anticipate?
4. How did my estimates (on budget, time, expectations) compare to the actuals?
5. Did something happen in the midst of the project that I should've seen coming but didn't?

Once you answered these questions, reflect on the answers and pull up your initial project brief/application that you had the client fill out and see if there are any correlations to be made.

This is the "Hindsight Exercise".

You now are standing in the future of what that application came to be. You know how well or bad the project went. Within the application, you want to look for indications in what that client filled out so that you can then go ahead and look for in your next lead.

Again whether it's good or bad. 

This is where you are honing your instincts, your gut. You are allowing time for you to pick up on indicators of both good and bad earlier on in your sales so that you can have more success with your projects.

As a business owner, as a salesperson, which if you are freelancing I hate to break the news here, but you are in sales, you need to close the open loops in the decision making for your leads and clients.

We don’t have control over the decision-making process anyone has, but we can lead them to that decision.

We can create a path to that decision that makes it easy for them to make a choice.

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You do a great job of getting people interested in you, yet in the final moment of helping them decide, you fall down.

You fall down because you leave the decision making solely on their shoulders.

This final moment is the tough part. It’s the part where I struggled with too. But it’s the part that needs to be mastered in order for you to have a sustainable business.

## Remove choices and create easy options

In sales, it’s your job to put the lead on the path to solving their problem. This is the mindset you need to be in so that  [you overcome objections in sales](https://rezzz.com/ask/overcome-objections-in-sales/).

When you remove choices and create easy options for a lead, they are more likely to buy from you.

Your goal should be to create a statement that presents a choice to them.

I was on a FB Live talking about follow-up and I said “There are 2 types of businesses online, ones who become freebie folks and ones who actually sell and make money.”

And now I wasn’t selling anything, but in the midst of the conversation, it framed everyone there watching, including the host, where they sat.

It made perfect sense for them to go ahead and see what they needed to do or take action on based from this live stream at that time.

By removing all the choices on how to do a follow-up sequence, how many emails, what tools to use, when to send them, and so on, I positioned the simple action of just doing a follow-up sequence against making money or not.

As service-based businesses, you and I have so many things that we know we can do for a lead to help them out.

The leads know they need the help, they just aren’t sure of the right choice or the right decision to make.

By painting a picture of who they are today and where they want to be with a simple action for them to take, you remove all the choices and give them the easy option to choose.

I was asked a question on a Twitter chat I was a part of that said “A few of us are clearly uncomfortable with the idea of seeming like a nuisance. Have you received a negative response to multiple follow-ups?”

Following up with someone after they’ve expressed interest in you is not being a nuisance or annoying or bothersome. Unless you are emailing them every day with “Just checking in.”

If you have an email that sounds like “Hey Pete, I was thinking about your project a little bit more and came across this article that talks specifically about that one thing. Here’s the link if you have a few minutes to check it out. If not, the big takeaways were…Hope you find it useful. Best, Jason”

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For whatever reason, most people, as service-based businesses, get all messed up in the head the closer someone gets to becoming a client.

Anytime they see an email address, they ask “can we add them to our email list?”

Yet, as it gets closer and closer to the sale, they start to shy away from it.

It’s very much a mindset that you put yourself into. One that in the beginning of starting my business, once I realized that it was just business and that if they thought me sending them an email that’s helpful is annoying, then we ultimately weren’t a good fit to work together.

Imagine you walk into a store, let’s say a car dealership. As you walk in you immediately go towards the car that you are interested in. You open the door, sit in the driver’s seat to see how it feels. You hop into the back to see how much legroom there is. And you come to the point where you want to get some more information.

So you seek out a salesperson. She comes over and you ask some questions about options, colors, if they have it in stock and she answers all of your questions and then takes you on a test drive.

As you walk back into the dealership you realize that you are completely alone. Even the salesperson, who was right behind you coming through the door is gone.

Now what? You’re ready to sit down and go over financing. 

You are literally standing there ready to buy and wondering what’s next.

Now I ask you “what’s annoying now?”

That’s what it can seem like for your leads. They opt-in to your lead magnet or fill out your contact form, maybe have a few back and forth emails with you, and even get on the phone with you and get to the proposal stage.

After you hang up on the call, it’s radio silence from you. The lead is wondering what happened? Seemed like things were working out, but they may be wondering what’s next. Even with the proposal in hand, they may have some questions still. In fact, there’s a good chance they do.

Here’s the thing, people, humans, are embarrassed to ask questions. They don’t want to look as if they don’t know something and even more so, during a negotiation period where they have your proposal in hand, they certainly don’t want to appear that they are at a disadvantage.

You can leave it up to them to reach out, that’s all well and fine. But what if they have a question, that your very next email in your follow-up sequence answers it?

How would that make the lead feel?

They probably feel like you fully understand them. That you can help them with their project and where they want to go.

What if they had some questions about your process, further than what you explained on your site?

Now your second follow-up email explains in further detail what it is like working with you?

Now they are feeling pretty great I would assume. They get their questions answered and you are exhibiting that you’ve been doing this for a while and understand, yet anticipate what the lead is thinking.

They are in your sales pipeline. They are on your list. If you are “annoying” them, they can click that link at the bottom of the emails and unsubscribe.

But I’ve never had that happen once because they’ve obviously taken some time to want to learn more about what I can do for them. If we had a call, then it’s even more apparent that they want more from me.

At that point, I’m really trying to add more value to help them make a better buying decision.

At the very least, if you feel that you are bugging someone, remember this. There’s the unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email going from your ConvertKit account, your MailChimp account, your Aweber account, whatever platform you use.

So if you have a sequence setup, you don’t even have to worry about the sending, it’s done for you.

Above all else, if a lead responds negatively to you providing them a follow-up sequence that’s helpful, answers questions, and positions you as an expert in your field, then are they going to respect your experience and expertise during the project? I’d bet not. Better to find that out now, rather than later.

Let’s assume for the sake of brevity that you are segmenting your list at least to the point of people who have bought and haven’t bought from you.

If you are like me, you are tag happy, they want to track everything someone on their list does and so they tag everything.

This is great, but if you don’t do anything with the information, it’s just clutter in your CRM or email marketing platform.

There really are 2 things to focus in on when you are segmenting your email list.

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Intent

The first is intent.

Why do people buy from you? What problems are they trying to solve?

Intent is essentially the buyer’s goal. It’s what they want to achieve when they buy from you.

Someone’s intent is all the benefits that are important to them that they will get from you, your solution or product.

It’s their motivation behind the purchase decision.

For example, you want to buy a big screen TV because the big game is on and you are having a party.

The intent here is you want everyone to see the game, and maybe impress your friends a little too.

That’s the motivation behind the purchase of a big screen TV.

Another example, and maybe a bit more relevant is a non-profit wants to redesign their website so that they get more signups for their fundraiser.

The intent here is that the non-profit needs signups to get more donations so that they can fuel their mission.

The motivation behind the purchase of a redesign is that it will result in more signups.

How you obtain this intent is either through asking them and recording that as a tag.

Or the more efficient way of getting that intent is by asking someone who just bought from you what they hope to achieve from their purchase.

Then you can take that information and turn that around into headlines on your website, maybe even case studies or articles too.

Interest

The second segment to focus on is interest.

This is harder to do, but when carefully planned out is powerful. Because interests is where you are able to really hone in on the language so that you can craft a proper buying journey for them.

Interest is a big area to cover because it has a wide range of possibilities. It’s actually where most get stuck in the weeds about, which in a minute I’ll share how you can avoid that.

For the sake of choosing the easy road first, demographics is a part of interests.

In the case above with the TV, the one making the decision obviously likes sports, has expendable income, and even has a time crunch to make a purchase.

In the case of the non-profit, well, that’s the first demographic. The age of their existing site and the number of signups they have for their fundraiser are also demographic data points.

Simply because they need a redesign doesn’t mean that they will convert into signups. You are the professional understand all the parameters that go into that conversion. Traffic, word-of-mouth, social, etc are all factors they don’t know about. If those are all good then moving a signup button around on the site make work. However, if there isn’t enough of that, a redesign may not even help. Maybe a paid ad campaign would be better for them.

The more difficult but intentional road to travel is creating opportunities for a potential buyer to engage with you that illustrate interest.

For example, if you’re like me, then you prefer video and audio content on the web over reading a 15,000-word article.

You can find this out by having various types of content that talk about the same thing. One type is video, another is a podcast and the other is the long form article.

This is an interest segment that allows you to give specific content types to them, but also know that if you are selling a book, they may be more interested in the audio book rather than the hard cover book.

How to start finding a subscriber’s interest

This segment is where most get into the weeds a bit because figuring out all the specific data points of interest is hard to do. So instead you tag everything and everyone.

If you are tagging everyone, then I suggest that you look at all those tags. See how many of your customers are in a particular tag.

Are you seeing a pattern of particular articles, videos, resources, lead magnets? If so, that’s where you start.

Those tags are telling you the story of your customers, that you’ll want to tell leads the same story.

Are you sitting there thinking that you suck at sales?

Maybe you say to yourself “I’m not confident in my selling skills.”

Are you feeling like you are doing all the things in sales that the best salespeople are telling you to do?

LinkedIn outreach, using tools for followup, even your [business coach](https://rezzz.com/coach/) aren’t 100%.

You have the mechanics of everything in place, but still feel like you aren’t able to hit the stride or get enough clients to fill that pipeline.

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I have just one question for you.

## Are you reviewing your sales process?

Do you listen to the recorded sales calls?

Are you listening more than talking?

Who’s asking more questions, you or the lead?

Are you reading between the lines of what the lead is telling you?

Do you have a spot on your calendar every single month to review your sales process?

It’s so important to be able to listen back on a sales call to hear how you sound to the lead.

Get over the fact of hearing your own voice and put yourself in the shoes of the lead. Ask yourself, as the lead, if you would buy from this person.

Listening to, reading transcriptions of the calls if you need to, is so important to be doing, especially early on or if you are trying something new.

Here’s why this is important.

## You think you sound good

When you are in conversation with someone, your brain in processing feedback and forming your next words as the words are coming out of your mouth.

When you listen back, you’ll hear all the “ums” and “ahs” and “you knows”. You’ll hear things that you don’t hear during the midst of the conversation.

You also hear spots in where you may stumble or misheard the question and wonder to yourself “what was I thinking?!?”

Once you hear these things, you can’t un-hear them and so you’ll be a little more conscious of them in the next one. Which in turn improves your sales communication.

## It’s not always all about you

If you don’t get a lead to close, ask why.

There’s a good chance they will never tell you. Or tell you something that really isn’t all that helpful.

But understanding the reason behind why someone chose not to move forward allows for you to adjust your process and sales conversation.

For example, if you keep hearing pushback on pricing, ask for the budget early on. If it’s timeline based, ask for the lead when they would like this done by earlier.

Another could be that they don’t like something about the process of working with you. Which then you may want to think about putting a nice write up about that on your website.

All these objections aren’t saying that you are wrong in any way. It’s simply saying that their expectations and needs differ. That’s all.

Putting in place a way to allow them to tell you a reason for not moving forward, saves you and future leads time. 

But it’s important because it creates space so that those leads that are a better fit have your attention, time, and focus.

Since Feb 26 in 2008, I’ve built my business without selling on Twitter.

I have no qualms about saying that Twitter is my home away from home.

Without Twitter, I’m not sure where I’d be right now to be honest.

I can attribute the growth of my business, my network of friends and colleagues, my clients, and you listening to this episode right now to the effort and engagement of my Twitter account.

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But Twitter is never the first place that I go to thinking about sales.

Engage

This is the very first tip here. Engage on Twitter!

Twitter is the biggest cocktail party on the planet. People making small talk, making introductions, complaining, connecting with people with would’ve never done so 15 years ago.

There’s really no place online like it.

I’ve been down the rabbit hold of blasting my followers with links, resources, and a plethora of other tweets fully automated and guess what happened?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing. Sure I would get a like or a new follower here and there. Aside from that, the actual natural engagement there is where the magic happens.

I shut off all my automation back in October of 2017 and everything, and I mean everything got better.

People started seeing my tweets more, the natural occurrence of thoughts and helpful shares became liked and retweeted more and more.

If someone likes or retweets or just mentions you on Twitter, you better thank them.

Don’t worry about getting the likes, worry about how you can reply to those that likes.

Sales Bot

You’ve heard me talk before about my Sales Bot. It’s what I’ve built my business on when first starting out and still use to this very day.

Here’s the deal and why this is important.

There are [about 8300 tweets every single second](http://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/#tweets-band). That’s fast!

A tweet has an average lifespan of [18 minutes](https://moz.com/blog/when-is-my-tweets-prime-of-life), which means that you have to be on top of things when they happen.

People complain all the time on Twitter with mentions of brands and/or people.

If you work with a certain platform, company, brand, or even person, and know that you can help solve problems that their customers have, it’s best to set up an alert for yourself than to spend your whole day on Twitter.

You’ve got work to do.

If you want my walk-through on setting up your own Sales Bot, jump onto my mailing list.

Patience

Be in it for the long game. Take it from me, I’ve tried experiments on all sorts of platforms including Periscope, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Beme, Blab, and so many others.

Nothing works quick, you have to be patient and play the long game.

Relationships, that’s what it’s about. The success of a relationship isn’t what happens in the first week or month.

It’s the years that are built up from the ground of that relationship that defines the success.

Twitter is about relationships first and foremost and if you aren’t in it for that, then no tips or tricks or strategies on Twitter will work for you.

This is where there’s a mismatch between the value that you have for the work and the value that the client sees in the work.

As the professional, you need to close this gap through education and focus.

The education is on the potential of the return on investment. That return on investment is focused on the success of the project.

Focus on the success of the project

The first thing you need to do is ask your client “what does success look like 6 or 12 months time?”

Here’s why this is important.

It takes the focus away from you and what you are charging the client for the work and onto what they are looking to get from the project.

Because that’s why they are talking to you in the first place, right? They didn’t come to you because they want to spend money with someone. They want their own problem solved.

So if they answer with something like “we want to have 1000 new signups to our email list” or “we would like to have 100 new customers” or “we want to show up on the first page of Google for a specific keyword”, all these things translate to the bottom line, the value they are putting on the project.

That bottom line is now out in the open for you to either follow up with another question that asks them what that value of a customer is, or if you can go ahead and do some quick math based on your knowledge of the business and how much they make from their customers, you can position the project price to that value.

A client needs to be educated by you before they buy from you

The education piece comes into play during the follow-up.

When you talk budget, you should be talking about very early on in the process. If you are doing so and still getting this objection, that means the client hasn’t had the proper education on the value of their problem.

This is where most freelancers and consultants fail. They fail at delivering a followup sequence that is valuable and defaults to waiting a few days and then sending an email that says “just wanted to check in and see if you have any questions.”

The reason this is the default is the fear that you don’t want to bug or bother them. The only way you will bother them is with that lame followup email. Because that followup has no value to them at all!

If you were to fire off some links or resources that pertain to their problem and the solution you are proposing to them, then how could that be bothering to them.

You are simply sending them what they want.

In fact, 80% of sales require 5 follow-ups after the first meeting. How many are you doing?

When you follow-up, you need to provide value. There’s no reason to ask them for questions, if they have them, they will ask, don’t worry about that.

During your own education and surfing online, when you find something that betters your business in any way. Or come across an interesting article on the industry. Save it, write some quick bullet items as takeaways and fire it off in a follow up to a client.

It’s that simple really.

This is something that you can do manually or as you mature the process, build out an email sequence.

Ideally, you want to the followups to be relevant and take the client on a journey that leads to you at the end.

If you’d like more details on exactly what goes into each email or the automated sequence, Stop The Cycle is a course that Curtis McHale and myself that teaches the finer details.

So if you are getting push back on your pricing, then I hope this was helpful to you. You just may have to start reframing the focus which is the hard part that needs practice. The easy part is following up.

Maybe it’s the time of year where goals and aspirations are high, then reality sets in the fears, the hesitations, the mind games start to mess with those aspirations because over the past couple of weeks through email, through Twitter, and in some communities I’m in people seem to be asking this same question.

How do you do the work and push past the fear of getting it out there.

Things like podcasting and “going live” and just the general action of putting something into the world is scary. I won’t ignore that.

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As someone who has introverted tendencies, if I were to look back when I was in school, I certainly wouldn’t have stood in the middle of campus and started answering questions from people. Or stand at the back of the bus and give lessons on how to do the homework from the night before.

That, in fact, sounds absurd. So it got me thinking about why now? What changed?

Because I’m still very much that introverted guy. In fact, for my wedding, I had to prepare days in advance for being the center of attention for family and friends. (Let’s be honest, my beautiful bride was the center, but I would get some collateral attention).

Yet, I have stood up and spoken at meetups and WordCamp NYC, where all eyeballs were on me.

You are listening to episode 225 of my third podcast.

My wife thinks I’m nuts for preferring to spend 60-minutes answering questions from people rather than presenting a scripted slideshow.

So what changed?

There are 2 things that I can nail down that make a difference in young Jason and me today.

Mindset

The first is the mindset. And before you turn this off, I’m not going to go into the woo-woo, rah-rah stuff.

When I say mindset here, I mean that this is something I genuinely enjoy doing.

I like helping people, I mean who doesn’t.

But what I can help people with is specific things that I have done myself and have experience with.

I also enjoy being around people such as yourself.

And the final point of mindset is that I have a long game, a life’s mission of sorts for time freedom and flexibility not only for myself but for anyone else who wants that.

So when I feel nervous, or apprehension about pushing publish, I think about those things and the rest becomes mechanical.

I get out of my own way.

Smaller steps get you farther

The second item is doing things in small iterations. Break things down into smaller chunks so that the action isn’t overwhelming.

You no doubt have heard this before, so let me share a concrete example for you.

When I did my first podcast, it was with other developers and it was called WP Dev Table.

By today’s standard, it was a very unprofessional podcast. We would set on a date to record, invite another developer onto the show, and open up Google Hangouts and record. That’s it. That’s all the podcast was.

We didn’t even have a set time and date for release, in fact, in the beginning, we didn’t even have a website or show notes.

But the simple action of pressing record would put it into the world.

Then over the years with this and Live In The Feast I’ve gotten incrementally better with show notes, music, production, promotion, and so on.

The point I want you to take away from this is pretty simple.

Anytime you start to feel that self-doubt or imposter syndrome or overwhelm creep in, ask yourself…

What is the smallest action I can make right now with this piece of knowledge I know about out into the world and in front of people I like?

Then just do it.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure why I’ve been asked this. I’m honored, but I’m not in any sort of position to give a great answer.

Simply because I’m one who studies business trends and not in that analytical type of position.

With that being said though, I’d like to share an aspect of the business that I’ve seen grow and produce amazing results, not just in my business, but other businesses as well.

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On Live In The Feast Season 4 and as I’m recording Season 5, the co-hosts who have come on the show and shared their experiences and insight have all talked about sales and marketing at a personal level.

When I say personal level, I mean that they are doing things that are unscalable like high-touch sales, like personalized videos, like one-on-one sessions.

They are doing things like creating welcome packages like what Andrew Askins, co-founder of Krit, spoke about in Episode 10.

I’ve found in my own business indications from prospects that they want a more customized, a more personalized experience.

When I think about my own buying habits, more often than not I lean in the direction towards getting a great experience more than anything else.

For example Podcast Royale, who edits and does all the production work for Live In The Feast. Can I get what they do for a lower cost, maybe?

But the experience I have when working with them. The feeling of knowing that all I need to do is record and put the files in Dropbox and the episode will cross the finish line and be published.

The back and forth conversations, feedback and advice is an experience that I’m happy to pay for.

If you are wondering why you aren’t closing more deals or maybe not getting repeat projects from a client, are you doing anything to better their experience?

I’m not saying that you need to send them away on an all expense paid vacation, but is there anything that you are doing to stand out and create a memorable moment in their minds.

This could be sending them a small gift for signing a contract with you. Maybe a wooden coaster with their logo on it. (Thank you, Agency Highway podcast).

Maybe it’s a hard copy of your onboarding sequence that you normally send via email.

Something that’s unique enough that allows you to stand out from all those just going through the motions.

I’m not going to say that it won’t cost you a small investment. Maybe even a bit of time to do. But that gesture is something that will delight them and make you memorable.