Ask Rezzz

This is a great question because I’m all about doubling down on what’s working.

Making word of mouth more predictable though is key here. You want to create opportunities that make word of mouth easy for those spreading the word.

Even though this was a question that came from my newsletter, I wanted to share it here, because I’m sure that word of mouth is your #1 lead generator.

I’m going to share with you 2 specific strategies to help you make your word of mouth more predictable.

Follow up sequence

When you are getting word of mouth, you are building your trust by proxy. That’s the warmest of leads because they are getting a personal recommendation from someone they already trust. 

The next step for you is to get them sold by presenting your solution.

In order to access that trust by proxy, then once someone becomes a past client, put them into a queue for a follow-up sequence.

This can be super simple and not complicated at all.

• 30 days after offboarding
• 60 days after offboarding
• 90 days after offboarding
• 120 days after offboarding

Each time you send them an email you are sharing with them something else they could be doing with what you gave them. Share with them how much you enjoyed the project and ultimately asking for that referral.

They should also be in your evergreen newsletter sequence as well, so that’s plenty of touchpoints.

Create a memorable experience

Do something special to create a memorable moment that’s remarkable.

Remarkable is key here. You want to this is as simple as possible but something someone talks about.

Laura Elizabeth, a designer who was on Live In The Feast back in Season 1, shared that she would send her clients a gift card for Starbucks right from the start.

She did this with a note saying, “grab a coffee on me so that you can go ahead and put together the content for the website.”

Chris Bintliff, owner of Not Really Rocket Science, shared that once he has a sales call with a lead, he’s gathered up enough data on a lead to send them a link to a custom built landing page of resources.

Both of these are brilliant ideas.

Think about what you can do that is remarkable and creates a great experience for your customers.

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Someone from my list had asked this question when I asked “what are you struggling with right now?”

What’s great about this question is that it’s smart. Smart because a “contracting resource” is someone who’s hired out by presumably another business to fill the gaps in their own business.

For example, development shops hiring a developer to help with their overflow work.

Whereas a “solo business owner” is someone who has a specific customer that they go after and serve a specific solution towards. They may be a developer who can write PHP, but they stay to a specific kind of customer because of the service they provide.

For example, they only work with SaaS companies providing onboarding development within their application.

I had this exact question back in 2011. I had most of my client work coming by way of other agencies. I purposefully did this due to me working in agencies for close to a decade. So I understood their pain, but also knew that I didn’t have to do the sales end, which at that time I was not very comfortable doing.

In 2011 I realized that I was running a business where I had no control over the work, timelines, budgets, rates, and had left a full-time job of 1 boss, for a job that had 8.

The first thing I did was stop taking any new sub-contracting work. Sure I did work for existing clients, but any new agencies that came my way, I said no to.

I started seeking out through my network for projects that I knew I could do, which were specifically focused on ecommerce.

No longer did I want to work on employee directories, back-end applications, custom database applications on the front-end. Had no interest in doing those types of things.

So I focused solely on ecommerce, put up a simple landing page talking about it, and then had an online form to fill out.

This was the first time I started my own sales pipeline.

The second thing, and key to the success I had, was to network.

Business is all about the people, this was the time I really started to double-down on Twitter and jump into the conversations that I could help people answer some questions.

I had [Bridget Willard](https://rezzz.com/podcast/bridget-willard-on-wordpress-why-twitter-is-the-best-and-relationship-marketing/) on Live In The Feast. She’s a Twitter guru and helps her clients build their businesses using relationship marketing on Twitter. She unpacked a ton of tactics, which one of them is about creating lists and watching out for specific questions that you can answer.

I didn’t realize it then, but that’s exactly what I was doing. I  would spend about 30 minutes a day on Twitter just jumping in and helping out.

It’s not fancy, but it’s the reality of business today. If it were 1950, I would’ve have been flipping through lead call lists and dialing. Except this day in age, people on social are there, complaining, telling you specifically what they are struggling with.

As a someone who is providing services, that’s a gold mine.

These 2 initial stepping stones were the genesis of my business today. Stop taking on new clients that I no longer wanted to work with. Then make a conscious effort to seek out those that I  do want to work for.

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This was asked from someone who’s on my email list, which by the way I love interacting with folks there. So many amazing conversations are sparked from it.

This person admits that SEO works well, and is in their words “very targeted” but they are often leads with low budgets.

Here's the thing, the tire-kickers aren't good leads and that don't pan out to become clients are a complete drain on the business.

It’s critical to have the leads understand the full picture before you push them into your pipeline. That means budget needs to be addressed further up the chain.

Optimization of the top of funnel

Assuming that SEO is working for inbound, and you are collecting names and emails as a request for your services, put a few more fields on that form. Budget being one of them.

Obviously SEO is working to bring folks in. So for your business  inbound strategy works. Next is to optimize your content accordingly to bring in the better, non-tire kicker leads.

[Josh Doody on Live In The Feast](https://rezzz.com/podcast/josh-doody-on-why-when-and-how-to-niche-your-business/) does an amazing job in regards to optimization of his content. He talks a lot on listening and adjusting his content based on the feedback he gets.

Now you need to plug the leak that's causing other leads to fall through the cracks. If it’s just budget related, aside from adding in the field to the contact form, a sentence or 2 within the content around budget may do the trick.

Another option is to write an article on why you are not the best option for them. It may sound a bit counter-intuitive, but best to share that information in black and white, rather than during a call or follow-up email.

Have them disqualify themselves

If it's any consolation, this isn't the first time I've heard this.

Getting any leads is a false positive for your business. In fact, it's a drain on the business.

It’s awesome to be able to notice why leads aren’t a fit, budget and timeline is often the easiest. Other aspects come later and through experience.

As soon as you realize how a lead isn’t a fit, and then it happens again, then it’s time to plug up that leak and move that criteria up the chain. Get it in front of the lead sooner so that they can disqualify themselves.

They don’t want to waste time either. So if you don’t take projects for anything less than $5,000, put that in front of those that only have $1500 so that they can then adjust their expectations if they really want to work with you, or move on to someone else.

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I get asked this question so much and I always answer with the same thing, “yours.”

But I was thinking about giving this question some thought, especially with regards to Day 1 of being a freelancer.

I want to go ahead and preface this with that I’m not going to be giving you a long list of sites to create profiles on away you go.

Sites like Upwork and 99designs and alike are all races to the bottom. Some other sites like Codeable and Toptal are hand-curated and at least have some sort of bar for you to hit before getting in.

I’m a firm believer in that no matter what you do, these sites will always put a ceiling on your income and clients. People posting gigs want bottom dollar and the site itself takes a piece of that, leaving you as a commodity and not in any sort of control of your own business.

With that being said, Fiverr to me seems like a good place to start, especially if you are just starting out.

Here are 3 reasons why I say this.

Your service is a product

When people look at Fiverr it is with a very specific task in mind.

They’ll look to hire someone who can make social media images, a piece of code, edit a video, create a video intro, and so on.

All these are literally products within a bigger service that you may be providing.

When you start out, you may think I can code a website or I can do brand design. These are large, often times, custom projects that are difficult to scope and price when starting out.

Creating a profile on Fiverr forces you to think small right away. You may even be able to know that creating a social media pack of images takes you 1 hour to do and you can charge $100  for and be profitable. Because you’ve done this already in the past.

It takes a lot of the guesswork that most freelancers have when starting out.

It also puts you into the mindset of looking at your services as products with profits in mindset, straight away. Something that most freelancers struggle with later on as their business matures.

Scope of work is clear-cut and well defined

Recurring revenue comes with a repeatable service within your business that has a defined scope, clear goal, and most of all profitable.

Smaller projects are easier to scope, market, optimize, and deliver.

Let’s take that example above.

Let’s say that you land 10 clients looking for social media images and charge $100 a piece for. That’s $1000 in 10 hours.

These clients are easier to market to and sell because they already know they need it.

If you sell one client on building a website for, that could be $5000 and take 4-6 weeks.

Sure it would be more revenue, but it would take you much longer to deliver the product, harder to sell, and market to.

At the end, you may have one client that’s happy and willing to give you a referral and testimonial.

Whereas with the social media images, you may have 10 after just a week willing to spread your good work.

You can learn how to run a profitable business with smaller projects

When starting out, I struggled with all the other things of running a business that wasn’t my development skills.

Having a service product that Fiverr forces you to think about allows you to figure out all the other moving pieces like client management, delivery, marketing, sales, and most importantly finances.

Revenue is not profit.

If you are spending 1 hour for $100 and then you can shave that time back to 30 minutes, you just doubled your effective hourly rate and increased your profits.

It’s much easier to adjust your internal processes and optimize them the more times you do it. Smaller projects afford this opportunity.

For these 3 reasons, I feel that Fiverr gives you the best opportunity to get your mindset right when you start freelancing. Eventually you’ll have to break away from it, but in doing so, you’ll have products to sell straight away and much faster than your counterparts who are still trying to figure out how to rank in the search over on Upwork.

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I want to share with you 4 statistics and I think you’ll get the answer to today’s question from them. Then I’ll share what I do and why I do it.

Why is follow-up vital

80% of sales require 5 follow-ups after the first meeting or conversation.

44% of sales reps give up after 1 follow-up and the average give up after 2.

50% of leads that enter a sales pipeline are not ready to buy in the near term.

On average, decision makers consume 5 pieces of content before being ready to speak to a sales rep.

Do you see a trend yet?

At a bare minimum you need 5.

For me, I keep following up until I get a “No.”

Standing out

I’ve heard stories from sales people who have landed their White Whale with 50+ follow-ups. It’s about persistence and making yourself stand out that often times wins the project.

Why re-marketing ads work so well? No doubt you’ve been followed around the internet like myself a few times and then gone ahead and bought that product or service.

In episode 188 - What do you do to position yourself as an expert to leads I shared the results of a Twitter poll that I ran which revealed that over half answered that they did not have a formal follow-up process and 29% had a process that was the “just checking in to see if you got my last email?” follow-up.

In Stop the Cycle, a course that Curtis McHale and I run, you can learn the exact sequence of follow-up, the content within those emails, and how to progress your follow-up sequence so that signing on the dotted line makes perfect sense to your lead as the next step.

A simple follow-up can answer your most asked questions

Here’s the interesting part of all this.

You want to stand out from the crowd, you want to position yourself as an expert to command higher rates, you want to close more deals, and you wonder how many times to “bug” a lead to sign that proposal.

You can kill 4 birds with one stone just by having a simple 5-part follow-up sequence.

Just by having a follow-up sequence you are standing out in a much smaller percentage of service providers.

Having a follow-up sequence that provides the lead with resources and content give you the ability to close that education gap that decision makers need to do prior to signing on the dotted line.

This also positions you as the expert in the space to that lead.

And if 80% of sales close after 5 touch points and decision makers need 5 pieces of content before making that decision, well, send off 5 follow-up emails.

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The end of the year always has us looking at revenue numbers doesn’t it. It’s also a great time of year to reevaluate our prices.

January 1 is a great time to also create deadlines and launching pads for yourself and clients as well.

Inside of the Sustainable Freelancer FB group, Meg asked this questions.

I can only presume that she’s done what so many of us business owners do this time of year.

Because it was such an awesome question, I thought that I’d share it with you in today’s episode, in case you have thought about this too.

I'll answer the latter first. Double it! Especially if you are sub-100 per hour.

Chances are that you are under charging and under calling your work.

Years ago when I was told to double it I thought "no way" but I trusted them since they were where I wanted to be and did so. Best decision I made.

If you get push back from all clients you can back away without too much issue saying "since you are a great customer, I can do 1.5X and then next year the 2X rate will go into effect."

To answer the first part of the question, give your existing clients a period of time to either come on board or move on.

If they decide to move on, that's fine because your rate is higher and need less to make the same.

Any potential new clients coming on board get your new rate today.

No need to wait or anything, they get the new rate today.

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Everyone’s businesses are different and unique. Just like them as a person.

Some freelancers I’ve spoken with grow agencies, others stay solo.

Some have aspirations of hiring a large team or scaling a product.

It’s very different and that’s why when someone asks me “why don’t you grow your business?” I often respond with “why?”

See I like being comfortable in my own lane. Having a few select clients on the roster that supports my family and allows us to live the life we want is perfect.

It also allows me to do things like this podcast, coaching, and build products.

I left the world of managing teams of developers when I quit the 9-to-5.

As my business matured though, I dabbled in the hiring process and bringing on people. I quickly realized that it wasn’t something I wanted to do.

Took a few failed attempts at growing a team on my part to realize that staying solo and being responsible for consistent income for my own family to live off of was what I wanted.

There is a pretty big focus in various communities that you need growth to be successful.

Someone who I have respected for quite a long time since I went freelance is Paul Jarvis.

Recently this year, I was lucky to have him come on Live In The Feast and then chat with him off-the-record too.

I’ve admired him from afar for the reason that he’s been able to run a very successful and lucrative business being a one-man show.

He’s coming out with a book called Company of One in January. He did not ask me to talk to you about this book. But you can goto ofone.co and pre-order it. When you do you’ll get the first chapter of the book.

I have to say as a non-reader, I’m excited for this book to come out.

He and a few others that I follow, really speak to the idea of “staying in your lane” and maybe going a few degrees left and right, but growing and scaling a business isn’t the goal of everyone.

If you are feeling pressure from others, or from comparing yourself to others on growing your business, stop and ask “why?”

You don’t have to be the next agency in SF or NY. Be the business that you want. Help the clients you want to work with.

Obviously be profitable in the process, but stay in your lane if that’s what you want and don’t let pressure or comparisons force you to a place that you don’t want to be.

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With the holidays fast approaching, one of which here in the U.S. just passed, there are bound to be parties to go to. Ones where you will meet folks who haven’t a clue as to what you do.

Don’t you love those folks who find out that you are a designer or developer and automatically want you to solve their home Wifi issues or their printer problems?

Well let’s solve that by coming to the table with something that helps them understand what specifically you do.

In episode 146 - Should I call myself a “freelancer”? I shared my thoughts on this topic (or debate really) and that it’s really about how you conduct yourself that matters.

This though is how you present yourself to the industry and market, not while holding a drink with holiday music in the background.

This is often called the elevator pitch.

I have a template for this that is:

“I help get . So they can .”

Here’s the thing, when you ask someone what it is that they do and they respond with “I’m a divorce attorney” you don’t ask them to look over your contract do you?

If they say “I’m a contractor” do you ask them to come hang some frames on the wall.

Of course not, you know that they don’t do that.

When you share these 2 sentences, there’s no question who you help and what you do.

To be honest, they may not even understand you. Only recently when I say “I help established online businesses increase revenue through repeat buyers and decreasing the time to the first purchase. So that they can focus on what they are great at and not get stuck in the weeds of technology” have I been getting any sort of followup.

When I said “I’m a web developer” I would get half of the people asking some followup about their own site or own computer problems. Or some crazy idea of a new website they had.

There are 3 key aspects to this 2 sentence reply:

1. By stating who you work for, they immediately know whether it’s them or not.
2. They identify (or don’t) with the last bit which is the pain point that you are solving.
3. When you state the results of what you do, that sticks in their minds as you being referable.

Point 3 is the interesting point here.

As a web developer, the next time this person hears someone, anyone, who needs work on their site, they will mention you and hand over a bad lead.

Now as someone who increases repeat buyers for the online business, or increases appointments to the practice, or creates a batter client onboarding for SaaS products, when that person hears any of these, then they will refer to you and give you a more qualified lead.

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How do I know Steve Folland?

Steve Folland is a creative video and audio freelancer and host of Being Freelance podcast.

This was an awesome experience chatting with Steve because I’ve been a listener of his podcast for quite a long time. So I felt a bit like “long time listener, first time caller” at first. Which for me is a bit strange because I don’t normally feel that way.

I was having a chat with him through the comments of one of Steve’s vlogs on YouTube and asked him if he had any room for a guest and he graciously invited me on.

In this episode, I had a chance to talk about the following:

“I’ve reached my goal, what’s next?”

In case you don’t want to read the rest of this, you can check out the [full episode](https://www.beingfreelance.com/season-6/freelance-web-developer-jason-resnick) for all the details.

In the episode, I shared a variety of things including:

• The number one reason for me to freelance in the first place
• How I learned HTML back in the 90s that I don’t recommend any one ever doing
• 3 stories of my life, 2 of which are true and one is a lie

Specifically I talk about my biggest hurdle when starting my own business. It was a scary time for sure, but with some self-awareness and support, I came through it.

The main takeaways from this show are:

• Setting up processes with the goal of sustainability in mind
• How I can help

Definitely go check it out.

If you have a chance too, check out a few of the other episodes as well.

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It’s Thanksgiving here in the US today. Happy Thanksgiving to you if you are celebrating today.

My family and I are spending some time together and eating way too much.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you for listening to the show.

There are a ton of podcasts out there that you could be listening to today, but you chose mine and for that I’m grateful and very appreciative.

I’m humbled by you continually supporting the show by asking your questions, listening, and sharing.

So I thank you so much for that. 

I do have some plans for the show in the future to make it even better for you, but more on that at as it gets closer.

So before I sign off today, take a minute, even if you aren’t in the US where it’s Thanksgiving, to think about someone you are grateful for and let them know.