In today’s (flash back) video from six years ago I take a prospect bookkeeper/accountant from Craigslist and turn them into a paying client.
This tactic is timeless and demonstrates a wonderful alternative to what I’m unfortunately seeing today from far too many younger freelancers.
Instead of building a relationship based on demonstrating a pain that someone you don’t know is having, and how they can solve it…many freelancers try to take a shortcut and jump right into spamming a stranger with a pitch.
That’s NOT gonna work.
But the tactic I show you here DOES work, and is TIMELESS, whether your prospects are on Craigslist, have a website, or on other Social Networks like LinkedIn.
The first step is to give this person a call and see whether I can help them to see the problems with their current process, from the viewpoint of the very customers they are trying to attract.
I want to not only see how they handle a typical customer inquiry, but also show them the things that a typical customer really would like to know when browsing their Craigslist ad.
This is what I call “holding up a mirror” to their business process.
It’s an incredibly effective selling technique, because my prospect usually pre-frames all of their own problems in the course of answering my questions.
Next, I offer a humorous (human) suggestion that I found something wrong with the way they were doing things. I try to not make it sound too critical, but instead more like a friend who is helping them out.
Finally, I suggest that I already have a bunch of other ideas on how I could easily “fix” these problems and more, and if they wanted, I would be happy to share my ideas for free via email.
After asking for an email address, I draft a simple outline and also suggest that it would ultimately be easier (and more cost effective) to have me do these “hands-on” with the prospect via a Zoom call for a small fee.
You can see an example of how this works even today at WPLaunchify.com