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 Dan Moretta who asks, How would you start a value-based conversation if you were the one looking for the clients? I don't get clients coming to me yet because of my work, so I have to do cold calling, emails, DMs, and such. Great question. I love this. The ask that you... What am I trying to say? When you are reaching out to a client and you're saying, Hey, I do stuff like this. Do you need stuff like this? What you're doing is setting yourself up as a sort of order taker. And I make hamburgers. Do you need any hamburgers? So instead of that, what you want to do is when you reach out to people, what your ask isn't, can we talk about you hiring me? Can I tell you all the great things I do so that you can hire me? The subtext being like, you're going to try and convince them to hire you. In your outreach, you want to say, Hey, I noticed something about your business. You're in a phase that is typical for my ideal kind of clients. Or they're a vertical that is the kind that you like to serve or you've got special experience in. You can reach out to them and say, Hey, I noticed that you are the kind of client that I typically work with. Or you could say, I noticed that your website is not passing the Google mobile test. That was a big thing for me for a while. And then the ask is, would you like to jump on a phone call? I fix stuff like that or I do stuff for people like you. From the outside, you look like you might be a good fit for us to work together. Would you like to jump on a phone call to see if there's a good fit? It's not to see if, you know, it's not, can we jump on a phone call so I can make a presentation to you like a dog and pony show to convince you that you should hire me? It's not like that at all. You want to come into it the way like a high level job interview would go. So you're not sort of walking in the door with your hat in your hand and, you know, like your hair all squeaky clean and hopefully they'll hire me. You don't want that approach. You want to walk in like an executive would who is fielding lots of offers and is only going to, you know, if they're going to spend the next three years working at some company, they want to make sure that it's the best one for them and that they can contribute to this particular culture and that it makes sense for both parties. So they're going to be a little bit more, not standoffish, but the interview is more of a two-way thing. When an interview, when an executive is interviewing for a position, it's more of a two-way street where both parties are seeing if there's a good fit. It's a job interview and the interview goes in both directions, which is why I call sales interviews sales interviews and not sales calls or sales meetings or sales presentations because that's not what it is. It's an interview. You're interviewing them just as much as they're interviewing you. So you want to see if there's a good fit. You might jump on the phone with them or you might go meet them for coffee and they're showing all kinds of red flags like we fired our last designer or maybe they're like we don't have any money. We just need something cheap done quick and there might be plenty of reasons why you'd be like, I don't think this is a great fit. So when you are doing outreach to scare up conversations like this, you want to, the ask is, would you like to jump on a call to see if there's a good fit? So when you get on the phone call, you've already set the expectation that you're going to be inquisitive. You're going to be pushing back. You're going to be asking them questions, maybe more questions than they're asking you. So that's really all it boils down to. Ask for a phone call to see if there's a good fit and then act like an executive would in a job interview. All right, I hope that helps. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question for me, you can hashtag ask Jonathan on Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube, and we'll 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, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction

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