Bekit
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- Aug 13, 2018
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Hey Talb, great job on taking action! Please don't be discouraged. You've come a long way, and you have some skills, and you've gotten some wins.
The big question is whether you can harness all that into enough momentum to get the flywheel turning and build up enough trust to get the clients you need coming your way.
So your post raises a few questions for me.
Are you located in the US?
What is your assembly line skill? Can you transfer to a bigger / better company in that industry and get more pay? If you can improve your hours and bring in more income, you'll open up space to devote to freelancing.
What are your housing options? Would it be viable to move, say, within biking distance of work? This could help free up your time.
Also, why didn't you go after other nail salons? "Targeted broad niches and carpet cleaners." Why those? Your testimonial is from a nail salon. If you niche down to be the "client-getting machine for nail salons," you could have a nationwide clientele and not have to reinvent the wheel very much for each client's campaign because you're able to reproduce the same set of actions just about everywhere.
Plus, if you think about it, this incentivizes the client to root AGAINST you getting results. "If I don't get you results, you get your money back plus $1,000." "Oh, ok, I'll just hire you and sabotage the results and end up with $1,000 extra in my pocket."
There's no need for you to do anything of the sort.
The "Risk Reversal" part of your sales pitch has one function: to overcome objections.
The main objection to overcome is trust.
There are other ways to cultivate trust. One is social proof, and you already have that in the form of a testimonial. Great job! Another is your credentials, and there are lots of ways that you can communicate your credentials (i.e. all the learnings you got out of this course) to potential clients. Basically, just take the claims from the Guru's own sales pitch to sell the course, and tell the client that you went through a training that has helped many other students to get X results for clients like Y.
What I'm trying to say is, offering a financially lucrative risk reversal guarantee is not the only lever you have to pull. There are tons of other ways that you can improve your sales pitch to get clients to say yes.
Thinking through the economics of your offer, though, I'm struggling to see how this is supposed to work.
You said you're charging $100 (your fee) for you to manage $200 in ad spend.
OK, so does that mean you would need 25 clients in order to make the $2500 per month that you're hoping for?
You going to have time for that?
Even if you did NOT have a full time job, I would think that managing ad spend for 25 clients would keep you busy.
Can you clarify the amount of time it's going to take you to handle each client and what they get for that $100? Seems super cheap. Especially if you do free work and give a refund to clients who don't get results.
Free way to do the same thing: Do the legwork to find the contact information of your target clients and reach out to them yourself. It takes more time, so it'll have to be your call to determine if money is more scarce than time. Try to systematize this so that you can get your ad in front of the same amount of leads as you would if you were paying $50/day in ads.
Can you get another raise by changing jobs again? There's a lot of talk about companies who can't find workers. Not sure if it's the case in your area, but it might be worth looking around.
All of these options look like a complete pivot away from the course of action that you've already invested some time and energy and serious money to develop. Unless you've fully concluded that you must walk away from this and eat the sunk cost (which may be the case - only you can make that decision), I would be looking at options instead for how you can get to the next step in this journey. For example:
A) Get a job as a media buyer in an ad agency so that you can further develop your marketing chops and your confidence in working with clients, while getting paid to develop your skills even more
B) Raise your prices to $1,000 per client for your fee and sell that. It's going to be just as easy (or just as hard) to sell it for $1,000 as it is to sell it for $100.
C) Do strategic partnerships with people who do related tasks to buying ads. For example, copywriters who write facebook ads or graphic designers who design facebook ads or affiliates who sell stuff using ads. Start conversations with them about how you do the actual work of running the ads. They might be happy to send clients your way who need ad management.
D) Develop your sales skills, poise and confidence, so that you are not losing potential clients just by virtue of the fact that they are reading "impostor syndrome" all over your body language.
E) Research the most profitable niches where people can afford to pay you well, such as dating, alternative health / supplements, and self help.
Hope this is helpful and provokes some thoughts and solutions!
The big question is whether you can harness all that into enough momentum to get the flywheel turning and build up enough trust to get the clients you need coming your way.
So your post raises a few questions for me.
Are you located in the US?
What is your assembly line skill? Can you transfer to a bigger / better company in that industry and get more pay? If you can improve your hours and bring in more income, you'll open up space to devote to freelancing.
What are your housing options? Would it be viable to move, say, within biking distance of work? This could help free up your time.
How did you land the nail salon as a client? Can you repeat those steps to land another client?I did managed to bring 7 new clients to a nail salon and got a video testimonial from a trial...I covered her ad spend of $100. She didn't want to stay on a retainer even though she got results. Since then I've been targeting broad niches and carpet cleaners
Also, why didn't you go after other nail salons? "Targeted broad niches and carpet cleaners." Why those? Your testimonial is from a nail salon. If you niche down to be the "client-getting machine for nail salons," you could have a nationwide clientele and not have to reinvent the wheel very much for each client's campaign because you're able to reproduce the same set of actions just about everywhere.
Yeah I would NOT do this.I financially cannot come up with a better offer with the income that I earn nor attend the coaching calls since I must work. An example of such an offer is, get 30 booked appointments or your money back plus $1,000 for wasting your time. The only guarantee they want me to offer as a risk reversal is free work with a Google review campaign and reactivation campaign
Plus, if you think about it, this incentivizes the client to root AGAINST you getting results. "If I don't get you results, you get your money back plus $1,000." "Oh, ok, I'll just hire you and sabotage the results and end up with $1,000 extra in my pocket."
There's no need for you to do anything of the sort.
The "Risk Reversal" part of your sales pitch has one function: to overcome objections.
The main objection to overcome is trust.
There are other ways to cultivate trust. One is social proof, and you already have that in the form of a testimonial. Great job! Another is your credentials, and there are lots of ways that you can communicate your credentials (i.e. all the learnings you got out of this course) to potential clients. Basically, just take the claims from the Guru's own sales pitch to sell the course, and tell the client that you went through a training that has helped many other students to get X results for clients like Y.
What I'm trying to say is, offering a financially lucrative risk reversal guarantee is not the only lever you have to pull. There are tons of other ways that you can improve your sales pitch to get clients to say yes.
The fact that you're setting appointments after hours is not necessarily a barrier. For small business owners who are busy, evenings and weekends may be the only time they can meet with you. Look for as many asynchronous ways to communicate as possible.Even more so, I don't have much time to set appointments and close appointments since I now have to go to work at a day job
Thinking through the economics of your offer, though, I'm struggling to see how this is supposed to work.
You said you're charging $100 (your fee) for you to manage $200 in ad spend.
OK, so does that mean you would need 25 clients in order to make the $2500 per month that you're hoping for?
You going to have time for that?
Even if you did NOT have a full time job, I would think that managing ad spend for 25 clients would keep you busy.
Can you clarify the amount of time it's going to take you to handle each client and what they get for that $100? Seems super cheap. Especially if you do free work and give a refund to clients who don't get results.
No way. That's a lot of money. It's easy for the coaches in a guru's program to tell you to do something like this. It's not their money. And for all they know, you're plenty wealthy, since you evidently had thousands of dollars to spare to join the course in the first place.as for paid ads, the coaches are telling me to spend at least $50 per day on ads for booked appointments.
Free way to do the same thing: Do the legwork to find the contact information of your target clients and reach out to them yourself. It takes more time, so it'll have to be your call to determine if money is more scarce than time. Try to systematize this so that you can get your ad in front of the same amount of leads as you would if you were paying $50/day in ads.
So you got a raise from $8.00? At least that's something. Congrats!On a side note, they are starting me off at $13.20
Can you get another raise by changing jobs again? There's a lot of talk about companies who can't find workers. Not sure if it's the case in your area, but it might be worth looking around.
A) Attend a coding bootcamp with an ISA and get a higher paying job to fund the agency with paid ads
B) Freelance copywriting so I that I wouldn't haven't spend $ on software tools that I am not using because I am not getting enough booked appointments organically, I'm flushing dollars...
C) Do Drop servicing so that I can focus primarily on sales calls and not concern myself with fulfillment or software costs.
D) Continue with the agency even though most local businesses close by the time I get home to internet access for zoom calls and fulfillment of the service.
F) Choose another niche or online business model like Fox Web Design
All of these options look like a complete pivot away from the course of action that you've already invested some time and energy and serious money to develop. Unless you've fully concluded that you must walk away from this and eat the sunk cost (which may be the case - only you can make that decision), I would be looking at options instead for how you can get to the next step in this journey. For example:
A) Get a job as a media buyer in an ad agency so that you can further develop your marketing chops and your confidence in working with clients, while getting paid to develop your skills even more
B) Raise your prices to $1,000 per client for your fee and sell that. It's going to be just as easy (or just as hard) to sell it for $1,000 as it is to sell it for $100.
C) Do strategic partnerships with people who do related tasks to buying ads. For example, copywriters who write facebook ads or graphic designers who design facebook ads or affiliates who sell stuff using ads. Start conversations with them about how you do the actual work of running the ads. They might be happy to send clients your way who need ad management.
D) Develop your sales skills, poise and confidence, so that you are not losing potential clients just by virtue of the fact that they are reading "impostor syndrome" all over your body language.
E) Research the most profitable niches where people can afford to pay you well, such as dating, alternative health / supplements, and self help.
Hope this is helpful and provokes some thoughts and solutions!