RINGING
“Hey, this is Daryl, you asked me to give you a call about your SEO”
“Hi mate, how are you?”
“I’m great thanks, how about you?”
Actually feeling anxious and terrified.
“Not bad”
“Great, so I wanted to have a quick chat about your online marketing”
“What sorry?”
“I wanted to discuss your online marketing. You said you were looking for SEO?”
I repeated myself, trying to speak more clearly.
“Who is this?”
Awkward.
“Daryl Rosser? You asked me to give you a call about your SEO”.
“Oh, sorry Daryl. I thought you were a friend of mine.”
We booked this call in at this time… Do I really speak that unclear? This is bad. How can I possibly turn this around and get the client?
“I’m just doing something at the minute, can I give you a call back in 2 mins?”
That’s it, blown it already. New record.
I agree. What else can I say.
“Sure, no problem. I’ll speak to you then.”
CLICK
This was how many calls went for me.
And it sucked.
I know SEO. Really damn well.
But I couldn’t sell it. I plain couldn’t sell.
And that left awkward call, after awkward call.
Not sounding like an expert.
Getting blown off.
This was a warm call too, not a cold call, which it may seem like.
This prospect asked me to give them a call. Hence how they recognised my name – eventually.
Now, I’ll let you in on what happened after this…
The prospect called me back.
I ran them through my sales process.
I closed the deal!
No kidding.
$1,000/month for a minimum of 6 months.
Not a bad deal.
Especially with how it started.
Despite being a terrible speaker, I had a funnel.
And that funnel is what got me the client. Not my ability.
Of course, it didn’t start that way.
I remember one of my first calls.
“Hi this is Daryl Rosser calling about your SEO?”
“Oh, Hi Daryl”
“So I wanted to talk about your SEO..”
“Okay”
At this point I hesitate. What the hell do I say next?
“Uhh.. have you done any SEO before?”
I finally asked after 5 seconds of awkward silence.
I tried to come up with a few more questions on the spot.
I wasn’t prepared.
There was no structure to the call.
I thought I could some how sell them on my services on the first call.
I couldn’t.
Another time, another prospect.
I’d spent a week building out this epic proposal, I got the idea before and thought it would work wonders.
I tried it on a local company.
Got on the phone with the owner, Ashley.
First call.
Already created a proposal for them based on some research I did.
It was going well. He was responsive. He liked the proposal.
What he didn’t like however was the price.
$1,000/month. A nice round number.
This was my first try with this new proposal template, and I’d never charged that much before.
I was terrified. How many people will really pay this? Isn’t that a lot for local businesses?
I was wrong. But not this time.
It wasn’t that they couldn’t pay that much, it was that I couldn’t sell them on that much.
Something was wrong with my process.
It was obvious. So I changed it, again.
I heard the principle that the more forms of contact you have with a prospect, the more likely they are to buy.
So I added steps. Pushed back the sale to further in the interaction.
It worked.
sales-funnel
This is my sales funnel.
From this, I usually break down sales into 3 simple steps:
Pre-Communication
Qualification
Proposal
First you communicate by email.
This is the pre-communication.
You use the right words to sound like an expert, and you organise a call with them.
That call is the qualification call.
You use this call to find out whether you want to work with them.
The call I mentioned before, where I jumped straight into the new proposal, that was nearly a sale.
If I had qualified them first, asked the right questions, it would have been a done-deal.
But I didn’t know that at the time.
I’d tried to skip a step, and as a result, I lost $1,000/month income.
Good lesson.
So, how do you qualify them?
It’s simple…
Step 1. Determine what you want in a client
Step 2. See if they’re a good fit.
Do you want to work with a one man plumbing business that can only take on 1-2 jobs per month?
I doubt it.
Then how do you avoid this?
You ask them questions…
“What size is your team?”
“Ideally, how many clients could you take on every month?”
Qualified, they now pass those requirements. Or not. Either way, time saved.
We’re not finished yet though.
You also want to qualify their problems and goals.
I follow a method of asking “SPIN” questions.
SPIN Selling
(Yes, I studied my ass off to learn all this stuff)
Situation – What is their current situation? How much work do they have? How big is their team? etc
Problem – What is their problem? There is a reason they are contacting you, find it.
Implication – What are the implications of the problems they have? If their problem is trying to expand into a new area, what will happen as a result of them not completing this expansion?
Need-payoff – What will the result of fixing their problems be?
A successful qualification call will include questions from each of these types.
This gives you a structure to follow.
Don’t think of questions as you go along.
Plan them in advanced based on what you need to know, then follow the script.
It’s as simple as that, and it works wonders.
The first time I tried this, it immediately established me as an expert.
I was on the phone with a local business owner, Kevin.
He was quite passive, and soft spoken.
Using the questions I got him talking. And talking.
(Note: You aren’t interviewing them, you’re having a conversation)
And it was a great conversation.
I learnt all about what he wanted to achieve, what problems he had.
Turns out he had tried SEO in the past with no success.
Crappy agencies, I thought to myself.
Once we had gone through my script, I told him our next step…
To put together a proposal for him of what we can do.
Didn’t ask. Presumed he wanted one.
“Great”
We booked a call for next week.
Of course I jumped for joy after the call.
My script actually worked!
Sure, it was only a proposal booked in.
But you saw how bad my previous calls were going.
I found out that asking questions sets the right positioning for you.
You’re qualifying them, they aren’t qualifying you.
And when you have a script, you sound like an expert.
No delays.
No ‘umms’ or ‘ahhs’.
You just say what needs to be said.
And it worked. The first time I ever tried it.
Kevin signed up as a client after the proposal. Another $1,000/m added to my income.
I could get used to this.
And I did.
Next time I added a setup fee of $4,500.
It was simple.
Qualify them. Walkthrough the proposal template. Close.
Same proposal every time.
But it isn’t just any old proposal.
Every prospect that has ever saw it, liked it.
But more importantly..
Every prospect that has ever saw it, learnt from it.
The Educated Close
That’s my personal strategy for closing clients despite being a terrible speaker.
It’s a simple principle, rather than try to sell your services, you teach your prospects about your services.
This is the reason I could get client after client without any testimonials.
Most testimonials are a waste of time.
Don’t get hung up on needing them.
The only reason to show a testimonial is to build trust.
If you can’t sell without testimonials, then your problem isn’t a lack of testimonials, it’s a lack of trust building.
And teaching is a more effective method of trust building than testimonials.
If someone told you I was good at SEO, you may believe them. Maybe more if they wrote it well.
But what if instead, I just showed you I was good at SEO.
What would convince you more?
Me showing you, obviously.
That’s why I educate prospects, instead of selling to them.
My proposal is thousands of words, and it takes around 50 mins to present it.
Present it
Totally forgot about that, let’s backtrack to that $4,500 setup fee client.
I was presenting the biggest proposal I’d ever created.
I had the business owner on the phone with me, and screensharing my screen.
They could see the proposal, but I could control at what rate.
It took me 52 minutes. Start to finish.
We went through everything…
Onsite optimisation, conversion rate optimisation, buying expired domains, adding links, anchor text… everything.
Then we got to the price.
“So, to do all of this, the investment is only $1,500/m with a choice of 2 setup packages”
I threw the “only” in last second, got to get the psychology right. But it may have made it unclear what I said.
Thankfully they could read it off my screen.
And then came the objections.
(I prefer referring to these as not now’s)
“Can you send me a copy of this?”
They always ask this. I’ve repeated this same sequence many times since.
“Sure, no problem. But do you like the idea of the campaign I’ve shared?”
I respond, attempting to continue the conversation.
He took the bait, sharing his enthusiasm.
After continuing to ask questions, I found his real objection.
I was just some random guy he had never met before.
And he was uneasy about needing to wait 6 months to see results.
I explained my background, and who I am. Explained how they should see results in as little as 3-4 months, but 6 months is a better measure for having it running for a while, seeing how well we work together, etc.
Deal done? No, he insisted on speaking to his business partner first.
I paused.
Couldn’t think of another question to continue the conversation, decided to accept this one.
“Okay, but can you let me know by Monday. We’re only looking to take on 1 more client this month, and can’t reserve the position for long?”
It was true. Except it was more that I was likely to only take on 1 that month. I’d have happily taken on 5 if given the opportunity.
But valid scarcity, and a push for a response.
He agreed.
Of course, he didn’t call me back on Monday.
In fact, he called me back 20 minutes later.
“We want to go ahead with the silver package”
I held in my excitement for the duration of the call.
That’s an extra $4,500 + $1,500/m.
This stuff really works.
And it was all planned.
It wasn’t skill that helped me find and respond to their objectives and keep the conversation going.
I’m awful at it.
My closing used to go like this:
“I need to think about it”
“Okay no problem. Thanks for your time today!”
I actually thought they needed to think about it.
After studying hours of videos on sales, and reading dozens of books, I realised that was all wrong.
They rarely need to think about it. It’s an excuse. An objection.
So I wrote them all down.
“I need to think about it”
“Can you send this to me?”
“I need to speak to my partner”
“Can you do anything on the price?”
And so on.
Then for each one, I wrote a response..
.. With a little help from all the books and videos I’d studied.
It worked. Really well.
I use the same script, the same “objection handlers”, and the same proposal – every time.
And over 82% of people that recieve a proposal from me, end up becoming a client.
I’ve kept this a secret for over a year while I’ve scaled my SEO agency.
But as my focus has been switching to affiliate SEO…
A few months ago, I decided to reveal it in a private paid webinar to members of my Facebook group.
This is what they had to say…
Nate's Testimonial
Now I want to help more people with these strategies.
That’s why I’ve put together a free 7 part email series to walk you through this.
You’ll recieve a new email every day for the next week, explaining the strategies behind this approach…
Like, what questions do you ask for qualifying? Or what should the proposal look like?
I truly believe that if I can get clients over the phone, a socially awkward computer nerd, anyone can.
But it takes time to learn.