Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy. Hey, Jonathan here. Got a question from Kalak Ho who asks, I'd be interested to hear about how you approach your value ladder or sales funnel process to acquire consulting gigs. You talk about giving three options in the proposal and pricing at various depths of engagement. Is that part of your funnel? Interesting. I suppose you could think of it like that, but I never thought of it like that. But I suppose in a sense it is. I guess it's semantics. I never thought of it like that. The way that when I was doing really high priced consulting, software consulting work in the mobile space, the way that my funnel was actually pretty basic. There wasn't much funnel to it at all. I played the model where I was excited about something that happened to be at the top of the Gartner hype cycle, which was mobile at the time, mobile in 2007, 2008, 2009. I was really excited about that. I was also a web developer prior to that, so I wanted to become an expert of web development for these new smartphones. I wrote a book about it for O'Reilly. My funnel basically was I picked a specialty that was very exciting to lots of early adopters. I made myself famous for it, basically. The funnel was pick a focus, get famous for it. I wrote a couple of books for O'Reilly. I blogged about it a lot. I tweeted about it a lot. I spoke at lots of conferences. I was speaking at about a conference a month, sometimes two, about 12 conferences a year, big web development conferences. I was flying all over the world. That was really my funnel. My funnel was get well-known, share a lot in public in ways that presented me as an authority in my space, authority author. A quick way to become an authority is to write a book because author. My funnel was I would basically go to a conference and people would come up to me afterwards and be like, how do we work together? We have to hire you. Then we'd exchange emails and we'd have a sales interview and then I would do all of the stuff that I talk about all the time. I would run that sales interview with a why conversation. I'd try to talk them out of working with me. Then I'd give them a proposal. It'd be fixed price based on value with three options. All the usual stuff I talk about. My website was not an important feature here really. I thought about it a lot because I was a web developer, but I don't think anybody ever came to me through my website. It was always because they read my book and got in touch with me through the book because my contact information was there or they got in touch with me because they saw me at a conference and they came up to me afterwards or they emailed me right after and we started a conversation. I would barely call that a funnel compared to what I do now because back then, the downside with that approach is you have no visibility into your pipeline. That's one thing. The other thing is since the interest that was getting pointed my way wasn't because of me per se, it was because everybody was interested or the early adopters were interested in the mobile web at the time. I piggybacked on that excitement from early adopters who were just looking. Certain people were just very forward thinking and they have a budget so they're willing to spend money to be cutting edge. My funnel was like I would basically go to a conference and people would come up to me afterwards and be like, how do we work together? We have to hire you. And then we'd exchange emails and we'd have a sales interview and then I would do all of the stuff that I talk about all the time. I would run that sales interview with a why conversation. I'd try to talk them out of working with me. Then I'd give them a proposal. It'd be fixed price based on value with three options. So all the usual stuff I talk about. But everything, you know, my website was not an important feature here really. It was like, I mean I thought about it a lot because I was a web developer, but I don't think anybody ever came to me through my website. It was always because they read my book and got in touch with me through the book because my contact information was there or they got in touch with me because they saw me at a conference and they came up to me afterwards or they emailed me right after and we started a conversation. So I would barely call that a funnel compared to what I do now because back then the downside with that approach is you have no visibility into your pipeline. That's one thing. The other thing is since the interest that was getting pointed my way wasn't because of me per se, it was because everybody was interested or the early adopters were interested in the mobile web at the time. So I kind of piggybacked on that excitement from early adopters who were just like looking, like certain people were just very forward thinking and they have a budget so they're willing to spend money to be cutting edge. So it was like, it was out of my control basically. So when mobile flattened out and became boring like it is now, the leads trickled off, trickled off, trickled off because all of the expertise that I had had, sort of me and like two or three other people in the world were well known for doing this particular thing. After a few years it was built into WordPress, it was built into jQuery, it was built into all the frameworks, it was like, it proliferated.

And then mobile flattened out and was kind of like, if some company didn't have a mobile website by 2012 or 13, they didn't want one. You know, it wasn't that they didn't think of it. So that's the downside. The two downsides are you have no visibility into your pipeline. Leads just sort of come out of nowhere. And in my case, I was pinned to the hype cycle, the hype curve, the Gartner curve of when it went into the trough, it was like, you know, no leads. So compare that to now where I have tons of, you know, this channel right now is part of my funnel, if you want to think of it like that. Raising awareness of people who don't know about me or never heard of me. And then it leads into my mailing list where I deliver lots of useful information on a daily basis and interact with people there. And that can lead to someone buying like one of my lower priced books, like Learn Your Lines or something. And it's like 29 bucks. And all of a sudden, they're like, wow, this was totally worth the money. And then they move up the ladder. So I see the, and I guess you could extend that into the options on the proposal. But I think that's a little bit of a stretch. That's more, I see a sales funnel. I guess it's called a sales funnel. But to me, it's more of a marketing thing. And yeah, I don't know. I guess it's just semantics. But I didn't think of it like that. To me, the funnel is about building trust with people by delivering value. Like whatever I'm asking you for, your attention or your email address or maybe a little bit of money, I want to make you glad you did it. I want to deliver 100% customer satisfaction on whatever that transaction was. And I believe that if I keep doing that, eventually people are going to move up the ladder and get more and more engaged with me. So I mean, it's not rocket science really. But value other sales funnel consulting gigs. Yeah, so if I was going to do consulting now, what would a funnel look like? It would look like probably what you see, and you're probably used to seeing this if you've researched it at all, where big company site has a white paper for download behind an opt-in. I don't know. I'm sure that works if you have a salesperson. But I don't think as a soloist I would have time to do that. I think the model that I used for the mobile web stuff is still the model that would work for high-priced consulting engagements. If I was going to do it now, it would probably be AR, VR, blockchain. I don't care about those technologies as an expert, though. But that's what you would do. You just literally go to the Gartner curve, see what's at the top of the curve, find something you're interested in. If it was me, it would probably be Internet of Things. I don't know if that's even on there anymore. And I would just try and write a book on it. I'd blog about it. I would just be all about that platform or that technology. And the decision makers at companies that are very cutting-edge are aware of those technologies, and they're going to be looking for experts. And the first thing they're going to do is search for a book, like who wrote a book on blockchain. And like, okay, which one of these books is the one that is similar to what we think we need, and so on and so forth. So you can ride that. You could just always be switching technologies at the top of that cycle and grabbing all the early adopters by getting published in Harvard Business Review or on big websites or write a book for O'Reilly or whoever, and then speak at conferences. And you're just positioned as an authority because a traditional publisher sort of anointed you as the expert on this thing that we want to write a book. And as you go to these conferences where your buyers are attending, you want to make sure it's conferences that your buyers would be attending, and you're up there on stage. You're like a sort of localized rock star for that time period, and you're going to attract a lot of attention. So I think that still works if you don't mind flying around, you don't mind writing a book. That's probably a good approach. Okay, that's probably enough. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question for me, hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, LinkedIn, or Twitter, and we'll find it and add it to the queue. See ya. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the Pricing Seminar. Pre-registration starts soon, and you can sign up to be the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at ThePricingSeminar.com. That URL again is ThePricingSeminar.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time? Or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space? Or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal? Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all,

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