Here’s a question I got today that I think is quite reasonable and covers a lot of the problems and reservations people encounter when they’re looking to sell their services to brick and mortar businesses:
I would like to make a great living selling offline products or services with these constraints:
1. No face to face – only phone , emails or ???
2. Reasonable continuity rate.
3. Potential to be more than just $44 for hours – although that is okay to start.
4. No cold calling – and strong preference to the client self qualifying by calling or contacting me.
5. If I left anything out – feel free to add – 🙂
Here is my answer to this question:
1. What you ask for is possible. I’ve had many clients over the years who have hired me from just emails or from emails and follow up phone calls.
I have found if you want to increase the percentage of prospects hiring you getting onto the phone with the business owner as early in the process as possible does wonders.
2. I’ve found that the people who do best at getting some kind of ongoing fees are those who make an ongoing service the most exciting part of the customized solution they offer to businesses. It’s really that simple.
3. You should be getting way more per hour than $44 an hour. First of all charge for the project or for an ongoing service…never by the hour. If you want to charge more you need to get better at establishing the potential dollar value of your service.
Just thinking through different ways of doing that with prospects will help you. Also we have a whole series of articles on the topic in the Gold Members section at Offlinebiz.com here…
Secrets To Establishing Value, Getting Hired And Massively Increasing The Fees You Can Charge…
Probably the biggest keys to charging more are being worth more (in other words making more profits for your clients), being willing to ask for more (understanding the real value of your service to a business) and being aware of your “posture” in your dealings with prospects and clients (being aware of how you come across to them and making sure they see you as an in demand consultant with highly valuable skills and knowledge.
4. I simply don’t do cold calling. I’m not against it but honestly it’s not the best way of getting a client. Outsourcing cold calling to someone else you might consider.
But I have two products that explain in detail multiple ways of getting clients that simply don’t involve cold calling and yes many of them will get prospects contacting you first.
The 2 products are:
Get Clients Now (one of my favorite strategies is the “gratitude magnet” which gets people you would barely believe would communicate with you at all emaling you back…usually the same day sometimes in just hours or minutes). And no the gratitude magnet has nothing to do with providing a service in advance or anything ephemeral…it’s a very solid, simple strategy that takes minutes and it’s may be the most effective icebreaker.
And there are many, many other strategies in the Get Clients Now product where you can get the ball rolling with an email. That is so much more effective than strategies like cold calling because when it comes down to it you’ll actually sit at your computer and send 20 or 30 or 100 emails but only a small percentage of people will sit on their phones and make even a dozen cold phone calls.
If I call someone it’s a person who has already shown a strong interest in what I’m doing, preferably someone who is showing signs that they have money and they’re ready to hire me. In some cases I don’t even talk to them on the phone. I just get them to pay me the upfront fee.
Offline Gold Army
You get a lot of people claiming their product or strategy is a “game changer” but this one really is.
As soon as you contact prospects by email they’ll WANT to talk to you. And you’ll find many who will both be interested in your services, but even more important, motivated to send you high quality prospects.
That’s the power of the Offline Gold Army strategy.
5. The thing that’s likely to make the biggest difference is making a really serious, committed decision that you’re going to make money from this.
Business is not a game and business owners often have their lives and their livelihoods on the line every day. If you’re going to persuade them to work with you they want to see that you genuinely care about them and that you’re genuinely COMMITTED.
Many people aren’t getting hired not because they don’t have skills but because they’ve never made any serious decision to make their own business work.
It’s great to have a service based business with next to no overheads and no real risks but it you want to really enter the business world and be seen as a serious option for helping business owners with their marketing they need to see that commitment in your eyes.