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 Nikki Cross who asks, I'd love to hear a more detailed video about outcome selling versus things I'm going to do to get the outcome. I didn't realize I struggled with this until I watched the video. So this is a comment on one of my previous videos. Okay, so the tendency, especially for someone who's a freelancer and sort of in this technician mindset, like I'm great at writing copy, I'm great at building websites, I'm great at writing, I don't know, Swift code or JavaScript. There's a tendency to overemphasize the importance of the activities of your craft versus why the customer wants it in the first place. So no customer will ever come to a front-end developer and say, we need 20,000 lines of JavaScript by next month. Nobody wants the code. Nobody wants the copy. Nobody wants the mock-ups. They want an outcome. So a business person is looking for business outcomes. So if someone comes to you ready to write a check or like potentially going to write a check, they're going to want a return on that investment. And those returns are going to be measured in business outcomes, in business ways. Even if they're intangible, they might be very tangible. Bottom line, you're going to fix their sales funnel and all of a sudden their sales are going to double, but they could be farther upstream. They could be things where your business outcome that you deliver is something they believe will contribute to an improvement that they're trying to make in their business. It could be an improvement way downstream of increased sales. It could be that they want to have a bigger impact with the business. It's a mission-driven business and they think it's really important to expand into a new market and you're going to help them do that. And there are going to be things that you can measure about your contribution that is moving the needle for them in their big picture objective. So in other words, even if you're not increasing sales by $100,000, therefore I can charge you $10,000, any project is worth something to the client. There's some dollar amount that is the maximum they would pay to achieve the outcome of the project. Okay, so when you go to the sales interview or when you have a sales interview over the phone and you ask the questions from the why conversation, what you're doing is you're trying to get past all of the activities that you think they want you to do or they think they want you to do. We want you to write this much code. We want you to write these many headlines. We want you to put together these marketing pieces and send them out in direct mail. They're probably going to start by talking about deliverables and tasks and things that they think they want you to do. And that's fine. You can write all that down. It can be helpful. But after that, you want to back up and then start asking the why questions. Why not not do this? This is going to be risky. This is going to be expensive. Why not just leave things the way they are? What's the transformation that you're trying to make here? So they're in a current state, which they probably thoroughly described to you by 10, 15 minutes into the phone call. And then you need to get a clear picture of the desired future state. So dear client, I understand where your business is at right now. You've told me you want to do all of these things that I do and I'm happy to do them. But I don't know. Where are you trying to go though? What is it that you're trying to achieve from this investment that you might be making with me in copy or code or photos or whatever? If they can't answer that, then there's nothing. There's no moving forward. If they don't know what they want to get out of it from a business standpoint, then there's nothing to price if you're going to do a value price. There's no way to do it because you don't know what the value is. But usually, if you're talking to the right person and not a gatekeeper, usually you can find out what they're trying to achieve. Let's say I finish this project with you. We finish this project and it's delivered a year later. What's your dream? What's your home run? What does that look like? What would be your dream situation? And if they can't answer that, you can sometimes go negative and say like, well, what would be a disaster? If at the end of this project, what would be a disastrous thing to have happen or a disastrous thing for me to deliver? What would be the worst possible thing? And you can usually reverse engineer what the best possible thing is from that. It depends on their worldview. Okay, so by the end of this phone call, if you've determined that there is a good fit between the two businesses and you should move forward with a proposal, then you're going to include a lot of information from the entire conversation because the proposal is basically a summation of the conversation. It's not salesy. You're not trying to convince them of anything. You're just like, here's where you are. Here's where you want to go. And here's what we believe my contribution could be to that transformation. It's like pretty straightforward. And then you give them three options.

And the three options are going to include some of the things that they mentioned because you believe that they're smart. So in other words, the client kind of self-diagnosed and prescribed their own medicine. And you agree, you're the doctor, and you're like, yeah, it probably would be smart for them to take Motrin in this case. So I would put in some of the deliverables or features or some of the things that I'm going to do into the proposals. So option one, I will write all this copy. I will deliver these interface, whatever, whatever the things are. And then additionally, and this is where most people do this already, they say, here are all the things I'm going to do. I wouldn't have tons of them. I'm talking like three to six bullet points of like, here's some things I'm going to do or deliverables that I'm going to do or deliver or some features that will be added to the software. But then you have another section, which is even more important right after that in the benefits of these features will be. And you tie them back to business benefits that someone who wasn't even in the room doesn't know about your craft at all, doesn't know what the whole point of this project is. They're going to look at those benefits, and they're going to be like, oh, those would be good things to have. So it'd be things like it could be something real intangible like increased morale, or it could be a better reputation in the marketplace, or it could be something like increased leads. Having this new interface is going to increase the number of leads coming in through your website or whatever the business outcome is of these things you're going to do. It's really important to put those in there because those are the things that they're going to compare the price to. The stuff you're going to do to get them to the increased leads or the increased reputation or the improved reputation, they're interested to have that in the proposal because they want to know that the information that they communicated to you was received. And now you're echoing it back to them. And they can be like, oh, okay, he or she heard us. He or she understands our situation. And we agree that these tasks or these deliverables or these features probably need to be there, probably going to have to have that. It gives them a picture of what the engagement will look like. But it's not the primary focus. The primary focus is the business benefits under option one and subsequently under options two and three so that the person who receives the proposal could take it to the CFO or their spouse or somebody who was not in the meeting, doesn't know what's going on. And they could say, well, do these prices make sense to you? And the thing they're going to look at is not that you're going to do 10,000 lines of code or that you're going to create X number of screens. What they're going to look at is the benefits of option one, the benefits of option two, and the benefits of option three. And they're going to say, well, is it worth it? The difference in price between options one and option two is $5,000. Are the benefits of option two worth that delta? And they'll be able to answer that question. So to summarize, you do have to put some of the stuff you're going to do, the sort of labor part, into the proposal because you talked about it and you want to communicate back to them that the message was received. You're a good communicator. You understand their situation. But what they really care about and what's much more important is adding the benefits, so the outcome. So the outcome of option one in business terms will be these three things and same for the other options. OK, hopefully that helps. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question for me, you can hashtag AskJonathan on LinkedIn, Twitter, 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 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.