Send this exact email to get your first customer (swipe copy included)

This month I’ve been walking you through the step-by-step process of starting your first online business.

Here is the framework we’ve been following:

Step 1: Find a popular blog post that teaches a specific marketing tactic.

Step 2: Identify people who want that marketing tactic implemented in their business.

Step 3: Get them to pay you money to do it for them.

A handful of people have run with these strategies. Started their own business. Even quit their jobs.

But let’s be honest for a minute…

99% of you have tried and failed.

Why is that?

Last week I picked up the phone and talked with several of you to find out.

I wanted to know what was going on.

What I discovered was this:

When it comes time to pitch your service and get your prospects to pay you…the wheels fall off.

Today I’m going to teach you the simple framework I’ve used for more than 10 years to pitch and close any service.

It’s helped me sell everything from multimillion-dollar conveyor systems to marketing services.

By the end of this article, you’ll have everything you need to pitch and close your first customer.

Ready to get started?

If you want to get back up to speed, here are the previous articles:

• Lesson 1: How to make $1,000 in the next 14 days

• Lesson 2: Case Study: How Devesh produced $10,000 per month in recurring revenue

• Lesson 3: Case Study: How Jonathan Siu made $2,000 in 5 days

• Lesson 4: How to find the email address of your prospects

• Lesson 5: How to build a relationship with your prospect before pitching

• Lesson 6: How to pitch and close your first contract

How to pitch your service so your prospect loves you and wants to work with you

Selling a service is a delicate thing.

If you’re too aggressive, you come across as a spammy salesperson.

If you’re too passive, you will die of starvation because no one will buy from you.

How do you find the balance?

How do you pitch your service like Devesh and Jonathan do, so that your prospective clients like you and want to do business with you?

This is how…

You don’t pitch them at all. 🙂

Let me explain.

As soon as you start “pitching” your prospects, you psychologically go into “How can I make money from you?” mode.

You DON’T want to do that.

It positions you with all of the other yahoos running around selling stuff.

Here is an example of someone doing that…

Does this email make me like them? No.

Does this email make me want to do business with them? No.

Is this a lazy email sent by someone who didn’t spend more than 5 minutes before pressing send? Yes.

There is a different way to go about selling your services.

A way that leaves your customers saying things like this…

Two-step process to make your prospects fall in love with you (and hire you)

So…

How do you get your prospects to fall in love with you and hire you?

Here is my two-step process.

Step 1: Execute your service for them.

Most people start the sales process by telling their prospects what they can do for them.

The typical pitch email looks like this:

Can you spot the problem with this?

The main problem with this pitch is that I don’t have any idea whether or not they can do what they say they can do.

All this person has done is TELL me what they can do.

But I don’t know them. I don’t like them. I don’t trust them.

In order to turn me into a customer, they have to overcome all three of those hurdles.

Know.

Like.

Trust.

If you are a huge established firm with a massive brand name, then these three hurdles are fairly quickly overcome.

But you aren’t any of those things.

You are just a random person on the internet.

So… how do you go from being a random person on the internet to being known, liked, trusted and hired?

Here is the secret….

SHOW THEM WHAT YOU CAN DO.

Don’t tell them. Show them.

What if the PPC firm sent me this email instead?

Does this email make me like them? Yes!

Does this email make me want to do business with them? Yes!

Is this a lazy email sent by someone who didn’t spend more than 5 minutes before pressing send? Heck no! (That took me 45 minutes to write.)

The key to making this work is to show your work to your prospects before you contact them.

Step 2: Perform your initial service for free.

But what next?

How do you go from working for free to getting paid?

Simple. Ask for it. 🙂

What you’ve done in Step 1 is crack the door open.

That is the hardest part.

Once the door is cracked, swinging it wide open is as easy as asking for it.

You do that by sending an email (or having a conversation) like this…

Action items

And that’s it.

That’s how Jonathan, Devesh and myself went from being random dudes on the internet to working with the world’s top entrepreneurs.

(People like Michael Hyatt, Pat Flynn, Jon Morrow, Jeff Goins and Noah Kagan.)

Nothing extravagant.

Just hard work, a solid strategy and persistence.

Do you want to do the same thing?

Here are your three action items for this lesson:

Action Item #1: Pick one prospect from the list you put together last week.

Action Item #2: Audit their business and verify they actually need your service.

Action Item #3: Create the full deliverable for them and email them using the “crack the door” template above.

Use the scripts I gave you.

Tweak them.

Make them your own.

And be sure to follow these general guidelines…

1. Never tell your prospects what you can do for them. Always SHOW them.

2. Spend at least 2-3 hours on your pitch, uniquely crafting it for each prospect.

3. Attach your work to a direct ROI whenever possible (ex. “pay me $500 and you make $2,000”).

4. The “cracking the door” stage isn’t about you getting paid. It’s about you working for them and showing results.

5. People in positions of authority are 100x busier than you. Be patient with them. But be persistent.

6. Always, always, always follow up. Unless someone tells you “Go away! Never talk to me again” you should have a calendar reminder to engage with them again.

Now you know exactly what you need to do.

No excuses.

Time to get to work!

..

Oh!

One more thing…

PS: Just hit me that I left something out of this series. In hindsight it’s probably the most important lesson I’ve learned in my 14 years in sales.

Instead of you going out and manually finding customers, pitching them and closing each individual sell, you can use this approach to attract prospects to you. This flips the entire dynamic of the sales process. It puts you in a position of power to charge more and be more selective about who you work for.

Early next week I’ll show you how to do that. Keep your eyes out.

PPS: (Do blog posts even have PS sections? I dunno. Let’s make it a thing.). Do you have questions on how to use  the ‘crack the door’ technique to start your business? Leave them below and I’ll jump in and personally help you.