How to Get Clients, Close Deals, and Get Contracts Signed

Key Takeaways

um [Music] hey what's up welcome to the copyblogger podcast my name is tim stoddart thank you so much for joining me every week i have my co-host ethan what's up ethan great to see you happy friday happy friday man yeah how was your week that was good it was good i think we were talking just before the episode kicked off here it's kicked my ass a little bit i'm still getting used to the new year but uh you know happy to be in like back in the mix yeah it was a good week um it's always so funny i feel like every time i start an episode i i you have to preface it by saying like before we hit record because there's always like that chat right great week for copyblogger and then for stodzy i was just saying well actually the timing was funny because um [Music] nathan from convertkit posted a really great thread on twitter the other day basically talking about the procedures he put in place now that they're like 40 people deep and they're all the way and they're all across the world and i think they're doing something silly like 29 million a year wow and all of the simple processes you put together to help the team communicate effectively without slack overload and so i took a lot of insights from from his twitter thread the other day and i've just been spending all week putting together all these these documents so that we can have uh cleaner processes and everybody actually knows how to properly interact in like this new digital frontier that we're all kind of figuring out and stumbling our way through so i feel really good now that it's over and that i got it done it's kind of like you know cleaning out your garage right like it sucks when you're doing it but after it's done you feel really good so i'm i'm i'm glad about that but i'm ready for the week to be be done and plus we're going to miami this weekend so i got a lot of driving to do oh that's right i didn't realize you guys were driving down that should be fun so you what do you like signing off at this and then getting in the car no we don't leave until sunday but we're completely unprepared like we're in miami for a month i don't i don't have anything packed like we're completely unprepared so we leave sunday morning so yeah by the time this gets released on tuesday i'll be in miami and i'm very much looking forward to it i'm going to be there for a month awesome so what are we talking about today today we are talking about landing our first clients so let's kick this thing off you got your start as a freelance writer tell me about your journey to land that first client and what that story looks like yeah sure so i should um i should qualify by saying i did get my start as a freelance writer but i very quickly transitioned into being a freelance web developer and there was a reason for this we actually we covered this a little bit in the last time i'll go into a little bit more detail so my first writing jobs were sketchy to say the least it was basically this was like 2012 so it seems crazy to say now but like the internet was basically still very young back then and uh i found some ads on craigslist that were paying writers i don't know 50 bucks a pop to write these short articles of all different types and i i forget what some of them were like some of them were technically based i think i wrote one about what is seo which is that's kind of interesting there's a throwback because that's a lot of what i do now some of them were reviews for dating sites which i mentioned in the last article or the last podcast and that was actually what got me to leave because uh the sites were just like they were i don't think they were bad they were just very sketchy like early stage startups that were clearly looking for traction and i got it in my head i'm like if somebody uses this and gets attacked or something like that and they're like but that there was a glowing review online i'm like i'm just never going to be able to sleep if i do this so i ended up walking away from that job and and really out of necessity transitioned into something else which was web development so i had always coming up through high school kind of had these like entrepreneurial ideas i won like a small grant to to to launch a project in college by competing in one of those elevator pitch competitions and so i'd always been like trying to start stuff always needed a website never had any money so over time had learned how to build those and it was essentially it became the first thing that people would like actually pay me to do right the startups never really worked out the businesses never really worked but people started paying me to build their websites and so that's kind of the long journey into web development as a as a as a career but i wanted to just give that back story to create a slight delineation before we go forward which is this i was thinking about it today and i'm like there really are two starts i think to most people's freelance career there's the first time you do a project and get paid for it and then there's like the first time you get a client on purpose and i think this is an important mistake yeah you're so right yeah okay i want to hear your story about this but like for me i think i had done two other websites and gotten paid for them one was for a cabinet maker and one was for my i have a an aunt uncle that run a dog daycare and they needed like an updated website oh and i think i had done one for my grandparents because they ran a bed and breakfast so i had done like a handful of these little projects but i had never gone out and like specifically said okay this is what i'm gonna do for work this is what i'm dedicating my time to come pay me to do this until a certain point and i'll talk about that certain point i mean i have i want to get into like the nitty-gritty of exactly how i did that but i'll just pause there because it sounds like you actually kind of resonate with that idea of like two different starting points for freelancers did you experience the same thing yeah absolutely i okay like i'll just put it all out there i was at a time in my life where i was heading in a whole new direction and i was reading a whole lot of motivational material and i just needed to fill my mind with with good stuff because i just had so many bad thoughts in my brain about who i was and how i thought about myself and my self-esteem and all that right um and actually you you liked my tweet the other day every year i read think and grow rich and it's a book that i read for the first time what would that have been in 2011 and it's a book that had a huge impact on me and there's a there's a part of that book uh it's it's stage three of the 12-step process to get rich basically um and it's called auto suggestion and it's basically like his representation of the secret you know that book the secret where like if you just the law of attraction if you just believe things hard enough i was like nah that's [ __ ] [ __ ] right and and i started doing it and i started imagining checks coming in the mailbox and every time i went open my mailbox that was living in delray beach in florida i would imagine that it was a check and about that time is when i heard an interview from seth godin it was on success magazine i had somebody that bought me a subscription to success magazine and it's so funny to think it was only what 11 years ago at this point but every issue of success magazine had a cd in it with an interview and like a cd what is that right and it was the first one i ever heard i didn't know who seth godin was at the time and i just remember listening to this interview and his idea of it was right where purple cow came out so like the idea virus and like the best ideas when and things that spread win and they asked him [Music] what do you think is the best place to start it's like the the question at the end of every interview right like if you give a piece of advice what would you say and he said start a blog don't tell anybody about it and write in it every day and so that was when blogspot was still around and so i started a blogspot and because black spot was owned by google there's like a little switch that you could put google ads on and um i didn't even know like what it was really like i had no idea what an ad network was or even that i was i was making money frankly i i guess i thought i was but i just i didn't have the awareness to realize it and then one day i come home and like what do you think happens there's a check in my mailbox for like 24. um i still have it i never deposited it yeah i just there's a check in my mailbox and uh and that was the switch that i really needed to actually just be like oh my god like this is possible like i can make money and so even though that wasn't necessarily like a freelance client that was the first thing where it's like i got that accidental deal you know where like your cousin's friend or something says like hey i got a friend who writes why don't you why don't you try this person out so that was my first like a job just kind of stumbled my way and then it gave me the confidence to believe like you know what i can actually go for this and try to get some clients of my own that's awesome i love i love stuff like that i have a well actually i have i have two things i want to say about this because um i'm surprised by the similarity in our experiences and it gets me wondering like you know is this just something that happens to everybody who starts down this path are these all just universal kind of experiences that you will have if you kind of embrace this lifestyle so real quick for anybody who's just listening i'm tilting my camera slightly so you can see the extremely messy cork board that's usually off out of frame right there that's the document that i read every day per napoleon hill's suggestion for the automation mine's in my drawer right next to my bed so and i got from that book i mean it's so this is something that i think maybe a lot of people do but don't often talk about great book love that book i had just to piggyback on that story i had a similar experience one time with one of those so one of the first businesses i ever tried to start i was in i think it was like my first year of college and i had just read the four hour work week and loved it and you know what i i actually still think like some of the things i tried to start back in the day could have worked if i knew more about what i was doing the thing that i had gotten some traction with or like early interest in was this idea for a website called rhodes scholars roads scholars and it was just gonna be like a student discount club for students who travel and i got like a little bit of money to get started had no idea how to build that into a business and ultimately walked away from it but i really feel like that could have worked and it like it could probably still work i know there are other companies especially now and then there was another one where i loved i just loved the four hour work week and i was like like i'm like i just i knew that book inside and out and i had uh was trying to figure out like how to get paid for spreading the word of that book so i like created these uh sessions like speaking sessions and i was trying to get people to pay me to come in and do those and uh i stuck i struck on this other idea of like i'm gonna sell the i'm just gonna sell the book like i'm just gonna order a bunch of the book and just sell it and it turns out it's actually really easy or at least it was at that time to become a distributor for random house you just filled out a form online and they would literally send you boxes of books on spec and so i had ordered like 700 worth of the four hour work week and vagabonding and forgot about them and then like like i forget what happened over the course of several weeks i kind of burned through a lot of ideas like you do at that age and then i was feeling really down one day and i was like man nothing's just like nothing's working out and i came home and there was a case of those books just on the doorstep and i was like oh this is cool so anyways that's a long diversion but since we're talking about like early starts and stuff like that i uh there's a lot from your story that resonates with me as well it's cool to hear that you got started that way so if that was the first accidental project how did you end up transitioning then into like what was the first time you went out and got a client yeah so there is another little preface to that and i think it's so important that you talked about the first client that comes your way because when it comes to freelancing especially and i see this all the time at copyblogger academy i don't i'm struggling a little bit to figure out what the word for this is and like how to properly teach it but if you're going out to get a client you have to believe that you can get a client it's it's such a hard thing to drill into people's heads because sometimes sometimes you can know it and then all of a sudden something just clicks and then you just believe right i mean it's it's like running the four minute mile type deal and until that happens until in your mind you feel not even necessarily good enough but like competent enough like figure outable then it's really hard to land that first client because people can smell it if you're pitching them and they can just smell that like this dude's just getting started or this girl doesn't really feel confident in themselves yet but in some cases i have actually personal scenario i can think of a specific example one of the first jobs i ever got where i had no business landing this freelance job but i could tell that the person who was hiring me just knew that i was more into it i was more a go-getter type i was going to figure it out and i was going to deliver the best job possible and it's important to start with that because there is something about that um exchange of value that has this feeling of belief and like trust that has to be noted but okay more specifically i got it through my blog i got a lot of stuff through my blog at the time that blog on blogspot that i told you about i named it the fourth dimension and that turned into timstodds.com which is still my personal blog and i was writing on that and facebook was a lot different then because remember the algorithm was different so if you had a facebook page of you know like 500 people and you posted an article like 200 of those people would really see it and now you can have a facebook page with like 100 000 people and 200 people will see it so i i had a facebook page i said tim's decides freelance writing or actually with stadzi um stadi freelance writing and i would write articles on my website and publish them and leads would come in and eventually through my experience of sharing my story with my sobriety and stuff like that i found this niche in addiction treatment centers and i found that there was a really high demand for written content in that field because there's like a language sort of there's a way that people communicate with each other and like lingo and and phrases and slogans and all that that if you know gives you like a real huge advantage so so okay let me summarize that the first step is like i believed i believed that like i could actually write well enough for people to hire me and through that belief i started a blog this is where i found copyblogger actually and around this time of my life and why i put a blog on wordpress and took it off of blogspot and i just i just started writing but more importantly i like shared my writing and i made it known that yes like i'm hireable and you should hire me and eventually when one thing led to another and i got my first client it was a uh all women's treatment center fort lauderdale florida i i can't remember what it's called but that was my first client wow right on so there's a lot in there that i think is going to be great to unpack and i want to come back to that concept of believing in a minute because i hadn't thought of that but it is it seems like a really critical component but before i ask you about that i'm curious do you remember what article it was that published that ultimately led to like the interaction with that treatment center were you were you saying something to the effect of like here's an example of something that i wrote please come hire me now or was it more like because i know your blog is typically kind of your thoughts on lots of different topics yeah had somebody just stumbled across that and said oh this person's a good writer i'm going to reach out and see if he happens to do this professionally what what was it that actually triggered them to make that connection do you remember i i do remember the connection and i guess this is the point i'm trying to make where the figure outable type aspect of it back then my my blog was much more marketing focused right i knew that this is what i wanted to do and i had been obsessively reading copyblogger and seth godin and and business comes to you instead of you going to get business and so like i this is so embarrassing to say now but i would go to copyblogger every day i would look at the newest article that brian or sonia where there was another guy named damian farnworth at the time that was a writer and i would take the article and i wouldn't copy it word for word but i would copy the exact structure and even like the the tag line and just think okay how can i take this and make it about something like kind of similar you know and then that's what i would write and yeah so eventually it came to me i don't think i mean i don't think that's embarrassing at all i think that's awesome and i see this i actually see this more often than people might expect among the most successful marketers that i know a lot of them have this habit of like saving stuff that catches their attention and then rehashing it so on twitter i mean if you follow enough people on twitter closely enough you'll see that there's a bunch of people out there who are writing great threads and every once in a while you start to see like a couple of them posting the same thread and that this is what's happening behind the scene like somebody looks at something goes oh this is good and then saves it and then does their version of it same thing for titles same thing for article ideas like i i actually don't think this is embarrassing at all i think it's it's tradecraft in some ways oh no i did it and eventually i got i remember the lead coming through it came through on facebook messenger well it wasn't even called facebook messenger back then it was it was totally different it was just an instant message on facebook man that's really going back you remember facebook before they integrated that and like everyone just wrote everything on everyone's walls that's going to come back to haunt all of us i think at some point like everybody all the millennials oh my god the internet doesn't forget yeah okay so my story was maybe maybe somewhere maybe different i'm not sure i'll let other people judge so when i decided to officially launch this business as a web developer there was a big component of that that actually ties into the belief thing that you talked about and i want to put a pin in that and come back to it so we can refer to it after this but as i mentioned i had done a couple of jobs and i knew enough about where web development was at the time to feel very comfortable saying whatever you need i can probably build it right now technical people listening to this know that that's actually a much taller order than it seems at first and like i was in a lot of ways i was naive enough not to know what i didn't know so i think that helped as well but i built a handful of websites and i felt pretty comfortable that i could do the job so my parents belonged to this real estate investment club they're still going i think it's called fortune builders and they're really cool they they kick a lot of ass their whole thing is like buying and flipping houses and investing in properties and if you look into the business these guys are just killing it and i remember in one of their sessions they had this tip where they said when you first start out like on your journey as a real estate investor here's what you should do you should go to mailchimp create an account then use their import feature and you what you do is you just literally like give it access to your gmail account and it pulls in every single email that you've ever interacted with to a list and then you click compose you write to that list and you say i'm a real estate investor and like i'm looking to to buy houses and you press send now this was 2012 or something like that so i think a lot of the flag for spam like there is now yeah a lot of the like uh manners around email and stuff have changed but i had heard that idea and i'm like that's brilliant why don't more people do that so that's exactly what i did and dude when we were i was prepping for this call i actually went back and found the email and my old mailchimp account still exists so i want to read it real quick and also give people thoughts on this first of all i should say well let me just give this story so i i did exactly that i went to mailchimp i created an account i had it pull in every email i'd ever interacted with i did a quick scan of the list to like pull out anything like you know like what my first jobs were on craigslist so there's all these craigslist emails in there that you don't really need to send anything to and then just other people that i thought might not want to hear from you or something like that but i didn't really edit the list that much and there's a reason for that and i think i would actually leave this the same in retrospect the reason for not heavily editing the list was because you never really know where an opportunity is going to come from and that's what this real estate group had said and so this was really uncomfortable for me but i challenged myself to not edit the list right so i drafted up this email i sent it i just looked at the stats the other day it went out to about five it went out to it was 568 people of them 200 people opened it and about 20 to 30 people clicked on the links to my website and i want to say a couple of quick things about this before we go any further so the first was as i mentioned i'm a little conflicted on this topic on this tactic today because the ethics or like the manners of just internet marketing have changed but here's the thing it it worked so i sent this email in less than 15 minutes after i sent it i got a response from somebody who said actually i should i should i should have pulled up the response but i read it last night and he said something to the effect of hey so-and-so sent me your information says like you're in the business of building websites now i think we might need your services like let me know if you want to talk within 15 minutes he ended up being my first serious client paid me several thousand dollars to overhaul his website we ended up working together for several years and he referred me to other people all of that he wasn't even on my email list it was all because an old colleague of mine somebody i interned with and hadn't talked to in years was on that list when i sent the email he was literally sitting in the office with this guy discussing how they were going to overhaul their company's website like the email pops in he goes huh speak of the devil like i know this guy he's all right you might want to talk to him so all that is kind of a long way of painting this picture i wanted to get really tactical and just zoom in on the specific tool was mailchimp i think they still probably offer this uh i've heard other people use tools to pull in all their contacts from linkedin definitely i sent it as one big list and i think a lot of people would probably hate on that these days if i were doing it again today i don't think i would do it the same way and i'll tell you what i would do but i feel compelled to point out it worked right it worked yeah and 30 of the people opened it nobody complained right i think that's the biggest fear that a lot of people get no matter how they're going to share their message their their biggest fear is i'm bothering somebody and i think that's something that everybody has to kind of work through and it worked it got my business started which was really important because i was like completely broke back then anyways what would i change if i was to do this today because like the just like what's kosher has changed i would still probably do the first part the same i would import every email into mailchimp just so i had them all in one spot because it's going to pull in emails people that you completely forgot you even knew right people you forgot you had any interaction with emails that you won't even recognize like i had had one interaction with a local newspaper several years prior and they ended up sending me either they wanted to interview me or they sent me like their ad sheet and they're like hey we can give you a really good deal on ads if you want to advertise your business so there's like there's all these opportunities that are going to come from not editing your list too early but rather than mass email everybody if i were starting a service business today i would do that first step and then i would literally spend my first week sitting down and i would just crush personalized emails yeah like 50 to 100 at a time until i started getting responses and like people asking for that i think that's the component that i would change today but this is extremely effective it worked and i have to say i've done this multiple times in my earlier years to a like probably somewhere between one and two thousand total email addresses and i only ever got one complaint on this and she was really pissed so yeah fine take that person off the list immediately but for whatever it's worth that's how i got my first mind it was a referral from an old intern colleague that i never would have reached out to otherwise and that's the mechanics behind it yeah cold email is still to this day really underrated it's just a grind and you got to be specific with it because you can waste a lot of time and not get very far but if you have like an objective i think cold email is really really important but you said you were going to read the email what's it say okay so i'm actually surprised that i made it this way like i i pulled this yesterday and this was a real throwback i didn't realize that i had written this this way but there's like a very fancy header image like all these photos from different travels and stuff can i share my screen here or not yeah sure i'll give you a great idea i was just going to ask that i was like i don't want to you know jack your screen you can share it now all right so this is it i don't know if people can see this oh my god look at that old school header image yeah so these are like all photos from different like trips that i had taken and it uh just for anybody listening it says exciting news smiley face and then here it leads in hello to all my old hello to all my friends contacts and i'm sure some enemies i just wanted to drop you a quick line and let you know what i'm up to these days i'm stoked to announce that i started a new business and there's a link to the website there for a couple years now i've been helping business owners redesign websites for their companies it was always more of a side project but i recently took it full time from minor code repairs to complete visual overhauls added functionality and mobile design i now do it all if you have a website and you're interested in having work done uh work like this done give me a shout here and there's another i think link to my normal website uh likewise if you have a friend co-worker boss pet with an internet presence who might be interested in work like this i'd appreciate it if you passed my name along uh they will too i promise if this is way outside your wheelhouse and you couldn't be more bored please unsubscribe below so i don't send you any more of this junk otherwise all the best ethan and then there's some i think i guess these were like links to recent projects or something yeah it works yeah so i will like give my past self credit and just say the copy is pretty playful it's pretty playful and i wouldn't hate getting this even if like i was like like i haven't talked to ethan in years so if you're going to try something like that maybe that helps well again the point is just like like you were saying like you went after it right it's it's yeah like i gotta find a word for i have to somehow incorporate this into my education just like that notion of like this is gonna happen and i'm gonna figure it out and it doesn't always happen in the first week sometimes is i'm not really like a woo-woo type person i don't believe in the law of attraction as like some mystical force i just believe that thoughts are things and thoughts have like an impact a physical impact on the world around you whether it's the the you know the the rays that your brain emits or the frequency of the vibrations of your brain waves it affects the world around you and somewhere within that things happen as a result of what you think like going back to thinking grow rich there's he says in the first chapter there's an under the secret which is an undertone of the whole book that he never actually says but eventually once you figure it out it becomes so real and to me and i think this is pretty well known but to me it is like the world becomes what you think like your life becomes what you think so if you just think and believe that you will get a client like you still have to get it right what is what's the expression god can move mountains but you need to bring a shovel like you still have to bring your shovel i haven't heard that one i like it yeah but but you can still go after it okay so i'm glad we got these stories i'm i'm rambling on a little bit did you have something else to say well i wanted to [Music] piggyback on what you had said about kind of searching for the term for like what this is yeah um both of our stories people are going to hate this but the term that comes to mind for me is like hustle or like grind or very face-to-face you're every story that i've heard of this involves somebody going out and talking about what it is that they're trying to do yeah and i i think there's an important distinction there for anybody who's actually done it because maybe you've experienced this it there's like a common i guess experience in the business world where you will build something and kind of hope that people are just going to find it i've done that myself plenty of times so many times everyone's done that yeah and it seems like the major difference between people who end up with some level of success on a project and those who don't at least in terms of getting it started lies in that moment of like are you gonna go talk about this or not you're just gonna put it out there on the web and just hope that the world finds it so in your case you started actively talking about it you were not just blogging but like also building a facebook group around these ideas that you were sharing which is a very proactive thing to try and do this was an email blast i also asked so i shared this in the trans community a day and i i asked people i said like what are some of the like stories from how'd you get your first clients and like literally everything that came back fell into this same category of putting things out in front of people so i have a couple of them like announcing your intention like hey i'm taking clients you should hire me for sure yeah and this works for different types of businesses too so there's one guy here who launched a brand of toy as he says i launched a brand of toys back in 2014 same thing hit up my mail contacts generated several sales and reviews which is cool there's somebody else who created a so this was interesting he created a course and it's like a i'm not sure if it's just a course or if they also do like live training but his initial feedback was i created a course and offered it for free on a related facebook group get the idea out there that got exposure which led to my first sale and i asked and said well hey what were you selling and here's the interesting part i think this is the second piece of the equation for what leads to like a successful successfully landing at first client it's super niche for him so i think for a service business or like really any kind of early stage idea you can make the argument that it needs to fall into one of two categories or if you fall into one of these two categories it's going to be much easier to land clients either something very niche where to your point you like speak the language and stuff like that or something that is difficult or like unpleasant for other people sucks yeah which is code so that sucks totally code or like or so another example of that is is uh copy on product pages i remember one of my first jobs ever there was a company in west palm beach florida that sold and repaired patio furniture and i wrote all of the products reviews on it because like those those products need to have words underneath there or else nobody buys it and even more so today because so many of us do shopping on our phone um but yeah it was awful it was so awful and i had to do it for like a month and a half but the thing is eventually i remember learning a lot about sto from that website i just patio furniture west palm beach like outdoor furniture set west palm beach outdoor chairs west palm beach and you know i would link some of the articles to the products and the conversion rate on the on the products went up as well it was it was the first time i ever was able to present to a client like the the hockey stick of a google analytics chart and really feeling like wow like words on the internet are powerful and but same thing you said like that client then referred me to somebody else it was um i still talked about so host your website 12 years later it was an air conditioning installation and repair business in uh in buoyant i i love how niche that is or not like i don't even know if niche is the right term but it's i don't if i was starting out writing copy it's not where i would first look so maybe niche isn't the right term but it's like unexpected businesses that still need all these things like everybody wants to be a copywriter at you know some sexy new startup but like every business needs this and so this guy's example was pretty interesting it turns out listen to this his training they teach a training class on tough customer service interactions with homeless people like how niche is that and it turns out the like i mean this is really important because you have a lot of these uh institutions that serve all types of people right like he says one of their major clients is libraries and the staff just don't know how to handle some of these interactions because they can be quite complex so he would you know he offers his free course and then businesses are like more than willing to kind of bring them in in order to pay for other training or something like that but this idea that like who would think to sell the libraries when you're creating courses it i don't think that can be overstated the importance of doing something that's either niche or offering a solution to something that's like unpleasant we have a couple of minutes left i would love to circle back to the beginning of this and maybe close this out with this idea of believing in your ability to sell so you you've done a ton of sales and i would like to hear you talk through this a little bit more specifically what i found myself wondering is can that be trained and if it can be maybe we can bring this home to like some like a very tangible example if you were training somebody new to sell say like stadzy's services and maybe this is something that you just went through recently with the documentation i don't know what would you do to instill that confidence in them out of the gate if they didn't have it before i'm so glad you brought this up because i was thinking about it in the beginning when how much should i incorporate tactics of sales and tactics of um like a attention getting it's kind of slipping my mind however you say that but there's two things in sales that everybody screws up and it's human nature um because it's in our dna almost not to be indebted to people and asking people for things is very very difficult like in the amygdalas of our brains and our lizards brains because there's just something innate in us that says like no no no don't ever take things from strangers because then they'll have a one-up on you basically um so there's two things people screw up they talk about themselves and then they don't ask for the money and like like it's it's those two things there's a great solution for it if you feel really comfortable about your writing and it's like hey i'm on social media i'm promoting myself and people talk about it but man i just can't close that deal uh read a book called you can't learn to sell a bike you can't learn to ride a bike at a seminar by uh something sandler it's called the sandler sale system and there's two things that this guy really really practices which totally changed my view on sales he has a has a visualization is called a submarine it's a submarine method and the idea is that some marines are obviously in precarious situations they're deep in the ocean and if there's a leak uh they're in chambers and so like once you lock a chamber you can't ever go back because it's flooded so you go through this process and once you go through each stage like you can never go backwards and so the first thing that you do in the sandler sales system is you make an upfront contract so you get the awkward point out of the way and you reduce the risk of having you know a proposal a presentation a pitch and then having an excitement what is it let me think about it right that's like [ __ ] knife to the heart of a really well present like a a presentation that you put a lot of hard work into for a sales pitch so you start right from the very beginning let's say we were doing this and say hey ethan thank you so much for the call i'm happy to take as long as you need to tell you about our services and what we can do for you i just have one simple request when i'm done please tell me yes or no that's all i ask i respect your time i'm gonna put a lot of time into this if i'm gonna get through this whole entire presentation you think that's fair right and then you use the f word because that f word is like again there's something innate about humanity that is is into fairness so do you think that's fair and of course you're gonna say yes and so now you put like their reputation on the line to get an answer so you can solve that problem just by using the upfront contract and then the second one is really just stuff that copywriting taught me where nobody cares about you they don't actually care about your business they don't care about your services they don't care about your amazing team and like how cool it is all they care about is my is their problem getting fixed so upfront contract and then drill it into your head they don't care about me they don't care about me they don't care about me they care about their problem getting fixed and if you do those things like that is the tactic of sales you aren't convincing somebody to do something you're taking somebody that probably needs what you have and persuading them to take the next step um yeah so i could like man there's times in my life where i think about just ditching this whole writing thing and just doing sales presentations you know because i really love negotiation and i think if people appreciated negotiation a little bit more um it would really really help them in their lives you know like how many people don't get what they want just because they don't ask and it it really upsets me sometimes so uh so that's my answer this is awesome i'm curious to know out of the gate did you always like sales or was that something that you developed no i developed it because because well you know i'm not sure i i've read so much and so i think i just i had a speech impediment when i was younger i was in speech class for years so i couldn't say and if you really listen i still struggle with sometimes but the letter r so if i were to say mirror it'd be like mira you know i couldn't get the ur part and i was so insecure as a kid just because every time i would talk like i get made fun of and eventually especially like because of that writing was my friend and through writing i think i really learned to like articulate my thoughts and present opinions and formulate arguments and when i was able to just get the confidence to get my speaking ability up and like a ton of speech class which uh really helped her name was mrs boop once i was able to do that i was like you know what i i can do this and so i i enjoyed not necessarily debate you know but i just enjoyed like being right basically but uh what really turned it over for me was working in the call center and i know we talked about this last time like if you want to learn the most valuable skill in the entire world go work at a call center for a year and a half and make 100 cold calls a day and get hung up on over and over and over again and figure out how to talk to strangers over the phone and have them trust you and believe in you enough to give you their credit card you learn things like talking when you smile and you realize that like you can actually hear over the phone when somebody's or excuse me smiling when you talk and you can learn that people hear if you're smiling when you talk and you just hear how conversations interact with each other when the person doing the selling has like a certain vibe about them so uh so yeah i really really developed it when i worked at that call center and i thought like damn this is a super power like it's an actual super power and then i started taking it seriously that's fascinating and i think you just found maybe the topic for our next conversation this always happens i had a similar experience which was that i hated sales until a handful of things changed my mind and i guess maybe we should get it we'll get into them on the next call but like at a high level i think there was a really fundamental shift around a few things one you mentioned which was just getting comfortable being hung up on and making that call i had a similar job in fact i mentioned the an internship that i had when i was younger i interned at a company selling lighting retrofits to convenience stores that's a good one yeah that's a good one yeah yeah it was tough it was tough a lot of getting told no it was the first time i ever had a cold call like just through a list of people and like where i was in the northeast like a lot of people who own convenience stores up there i don't know if this is still true but at least then it was mostly like chinese and indian people so there were and hispanic like there was a immediate language barrier in most of those calls so if you're going to be successful not only do you have to pick up the phone and like win somebody's trust but do it across a cultural gap as well and for the most part i just was i wasn't very successful but i did get used to that concept of just picking up the phone dialing maybe not being so attached to the outcome because i think that's what trips people up a lot but then i had so one is getting over that fear of getting told no i think the other one which is maybe tied into this for me was real life others too realizing similar to what you said your job is not to convince somebody to buy what you're selling your job is to see if they need what you're selling and just confirm it right so you have a product and if you actually believe that that product does what it's supposed to do the only thing you're doing in a sales call is assessing what that person needs and then showing them how you can help them that was a big unlock for me understanding that because i don't feel like i'm particularly quick-witted or anything like that like only like a silver tongue when it comes to negotiating on the fly but i'm pretty good at like asking questions and then the other the last thing was so i did a brief stint selling kitchens and bathrooms for sears and that was brutal too because we got those leads from basically people who did not want to be bothered our like appliance repair team would go into their house repair their fridge and then say hey wow are you interested in like a quote to it's a free quote to have your kitchen redone and instantly they're like yeah sure whatever just get out of my house so we were going to people's houses trying to sell them incredibly expensive kitchens that's a whole other story but what i learned there was this idea that objections are a good thing they're useful for you if you're trying to sell yeah because if somebody just hits you with well let me think about it you have no idea what's going through their head but if they if i can get them to say you know well you know what's what do you think is the biggest thing that's keeping you from saying yes today which i hate that as a question but some version of that and they say well you know like i don't know i'm saving up for a new car and just kind of like gets in the way of that goal or whatever it is i don't know what it'll be now you have something to work with so those three things help me a lot and it sounds like you had a similar journey so maybe the next episode is we dig in on sales specifically for like services in this game or like writing and just maybe with a specific focus on like how do you actually close these deals it's one thing to get somebody to email you and say like hey you know we need a new website or i need this copywritten how do you actually turn that into money that's where we can go next with this that's it because everybody wants to slam dunk right but like making money requires not the slam dunks that anybody can get it's going out and get it this is my favorite podcast so far man this this was great i mean we went so far that we didn't even need the notes this time i had a whole art a whole article from kaylee moore that i was going to go through i'll make sure i put this article in the job notes because um i think haley did a really great job but but really she just more or less wrote down a lot of the things that we that we said about putting yourself out there networking with people asking friends and colleagues and acquaintances for like email referrals so yeah let's let's save some of this for next week because i think now i think now we talked about okay you got the boulder moving right it's a it's it's a it's a law of physics it takes more force to get something moving than to keep it moving so we got the boulder moving now how do we really like start getting deals how do we start closing deals how do we um get that momentum to to to grow our business so i'm jax this is great awesome yeah i like this too i i i liked that it was super tactical it was fun to hear more about your story as well so if everybody enjoyed this be sure to uh let us know on twitter i'm uh at damn ethan and tim what are you these days i'm at tim stotts t-i-m-s-d-o-d-z make sure you hit us up on twitter um please like and subscribe to the podcast it's the best thing you can do to support this show and we will talk to you next tuesday have a good weekend can i throw one more thing out before we stop recording please okay cool so if you like and subscribe and you're on this journey trying to get some attention for whatever your service your business is send us a screenshot dm us on twitter let us know so like when you subscribe send us a screenshot and we'll uh we'll shout you out on the pod i love that yeah what a great idea and you know what else we should start doing maybe i won't even put this in the in the show but i think this would be really cool maybe we can have uh people like use examples of the tactics that we [ __ ] give them and then like celebrate it together that would be cool too yeah that would be awesome so we're we're out there we're paying attention make sure you hit us up and we'll see you next week bye guys see you later [Music] you