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. I've got a question from Nissa who asks, how do you do value pricing with prospects who you're reaching via cold outreach, i.e. they may not know they need your service yet. You're trying to educate them and then sell them a solution. All right, I love this question because I know this is the way people are thinking about selling, thinking about marketing, thinking about pricing, and I want to offer an alternate approach. I want to change your mindset a little bit here. So whether you're doing outreach or so you're basically cold calling people, let's just say, or connecting with them on LinkedIn, whoever's starting the conversation, whether it's you starting the conversation or whether it's the client starting the conversation, the next thing that needs to happen is a conversation. So whoever started it, there needs to be a conversation, probably on the phone or in person, whatever. It needs to be a real-time conversation, probably not email. It's probably something real-time, ideally in person or on the phone. The point of that phone call is to find out if there's a good fit. It's not to educate them about how great you are or what kind of problems they have that they didn't even realize and then convince them of anything. You're not trying to convince them that they should buy your service. So in Nissa's question, she says, they may not know they need your service as of yet. Well, you don't know either. So I can look at a dirty truck in the parking lot, like a dirty pickup truck, and think that they need a car wash. I sell car washes. I'm going to stand here until this person comes back to their truck and be like, you need a car wash and here's why, and here's what it's going to cost you. You don't know if they even care. They probably don't care. They've demonstrated by their behavior that they don't care that their truck is dirty. If you want to sell car washes, you probably should go find the clean trucks and wait for those people and say, hey, you sick of cleaning your truck by yourself? I can do it for you. So the point I'm making is you don't know if they need your service. Even if the thing that you do, let's say, is like when I used to do responsive web design and advise people about their mobile web presence, it's easy to find websites all day long that were desktop only, that were just like horrible on mobile. It was almost like they tried to make them bad on mobile. These companies probably don't care. And if they don't care, they're not going to value the solution that you have. So coming into a sales meeting trying to educate the client, to me, is a bad use of resources. A better use of resources would be to find people who probably already value what you do, don't need to be educated about the value of, say, design or effective copywriting or beautiful photography. They don't need to be educated about the benefits. It's really just a question of like they already know that they value that. Why should we pick you or pay you all this money when we can get someone cheaper? It's a very different conversation to have. So when you're doing outreach, to answer the question specifically, you're not doing outreach to get them on a sales call to educate them, pressure them into hiring you or to give you money. What you're doing is say, hey, I noticed X, Y, and Z. I see you guys are in this space. You exhibit a lot of the characteristics of my ideal client. What do you say we jump on a quick phone call and see if there's a good fit? Maybe there's a partnership that we can have here that we would both profit from mutually. There's no assumptions about whether or not you actually can help them because they might not be in the mindset or they might be solving the problem that you see in a different way, completely different way. All right. So don't presume that they need you. Always be like, let's just see if there's a good fit. And then even if you're doing outreach, the phone call, you can still have the why conversation because you're trying to find out if there's a good fit. You're not trying to convince them no matter what that they should hire you. Okay. I hope that helps. My name is Jonathan Stark. And if you have a question for me, you can hashtag ask Jonathan on YouTube, LinkedIn, or Twitter, and we'll find it and I'll answer it as soon as I can. Bye. 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 able to first to know when early bird pricing is announced at the pricing seminar.com. That URL again is the pricing seminar.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

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, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call. C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.