The #1 cause of companies going out of business? Lack of sales.
The #1 cause of you not making more money? Leaving your day job? Helping more people?
Lack of sales.
Today, I’m going to teach you how to avoid that and land your first $3,000 per month contract.
I’ll do so by showing you something I am currently selling and how I am doing it.
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What I am trying to sell
Most of you know that Videofruit is a blog that teaches business owners how to use video to grow their business, but it’s also a services company. I work with a handful of businesses implementing the formulas that I write about on the blog.
Providing services does 3 things:
- Vets the formulas so they are not just some pie in the sky idea, but proven strategies.
- Gives me a fresh supply of new ideas and real world experience.
- Brings in good money.
One of the services I offer is a weekly video blog series.
Have you ever seen ‘Whiteboard Friday‘ by Moz? Like that.
Every week I make a new video blog post that is around 3-6 minutes long and is educational in nature. I started this 6 months ago and my first client was KISSmetrics.
And until now they’ve been the only client that I do this for. However, I would like to change that.
The big question is…HOW?
How I am doing it
Good ole’ fashion email. No twitter, no blog, no facebook, just email.
Here is my exact approach
Step 1: Make a list of potential clients
My target customer for this isn’t your average blogger but companies with at least $5-10 million in yearly revenue and are most likely ventured back. They update their blogs daily and are looked at as industry leaders in their field.
Basically, they need to be BIG on blogging and not scared of spending some money.
A months worth of videos can cost between $2,000 and $4,000 (there are quite a few variables).
I started with companies I already had connections to. Companies that I either did business with or followed closely.
I created a new note in Evernote a few weeks back and slowly kept adding to it over the last 2 weeks.
Step 2: I set a goal for March
Next, I set a goal for the month of March. I wanted to send out one new proposal every day for a month.
It’s not official until it’s on the whiteboard 🙂
With my list in hand and a goal set all I needed was something compelling to send my prospects.
Step 3: Prepare myself mentally
Past sales experience has taught me three main things
- When selling a high dollar product, spend MORE time on each lead and less time on getting new leads.
- Personalize your proposal as much as possible. People get pitched all the time! More Personal = More Response = More Sales
- Set a ‘NO’ Goal. Set a number of time you EXPECT to get told ‘No, I’m not interested’ before you get a ‘Yes.’ Whatever number you pick, multiply it by 10x.
I set my expectations at:
- Send 20 proposals
- Get 1 yes (maybe)
Step 4: The Proposal
Now its time to start sending proposals.
My plan was:
- Create a custom video for each lead.
- The video would be between 1-2 minutes
- Send them a short email with a link to the vid
- Tell them I can do one like this every week if they want
The style of video would be identical to what I use for KISSmetrics.
Here is the quick and dirty script I wrote the prospect:
Here is a screenshot of the video I made:
Here is the actual email I sent (click it for a larger version):
(since i’m still working on this prospect I’ve blurred out their info)
Step 5: Find an email address
Next I had to try to find the best person to email. My process was fairly simple
- Google the search term “CMO of XXX”
- XXX = name
When I found their first and last name I used this spreadsheet to generate a list of potential emails address.
Then I copy and pasted the entire list into Gmail and used Rapportive to help me identify the actual email address.
Step 6: Tracking the emails
Since these emails were coming unsolicited and from someone they didn’t know, I wanted to be able to see when they opened them emails and what links they clicked on.
This would allow me to accurately gauge when to send a followup email and when to abandon trying to contact someone and find a new point of contact.
To do this, I installed the free Chrome extension, Bananatag. It allows you to easily track your emails and see how they are interacted with.
Here are the email analytics so far:
4 of the 6 people I have sent the proposals to have opened them and half have clicked through to watch the video.
Does it work?
Short answer…YES!
Much better than I anticipated. I started doing this just a few days ago and I’ve already signed up one new client and have another that is in the ‘talking price’ stage.
If you want to do this to here are the main things you need to remember:
- Think Personal not Bulk.
- Spend time to develop a quality proposal that will catch their eye
- Do it over and over again until it works. Tweak as you go.