He Had 20,000 Website Visitors and A Broken Sales Process | The Multi 6-Figure Freelancer Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 361

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. One of my clients is a mixing engineer, who's got tens of thousands of website visitors per month, doing really well because he has a YouTube channel that brings tons of traffic to his studio's website. He's got very streamlined packages that are 100% self-serve, meaning he has people come to his site and they can buy his service directly on the website and check out basically self-service 100% there. And we're essentially trying to get him to multi-six figures. I'm going to put this as part of our multi-six figure series because this is a really important conversation related to that because in his case, we looked under the hood and did the math, look at the numbers, and figured out it's a very inefficient sales process. Turns out just sending people to your website to self-checkout is a horrible way to do sales. When we look at the actual numbers, he is getting 23 cents per visitor. Meanwhile, when you look at our numbers, just so you have some comparison, we're seeing $30 or more per visitor to our site with a fraction of the traffic. And the only difference is our sales strategy. How do I make it as easy as possible for me to sell so I don't have to talk to somebody, I don't have to look at somebody, I don't have to speak to somebody, nobody has to bother me? Passive sales seems like the holy grail, where you can just send someone to a checkout page and then they buy and then you fulfill them the service. It seems to work for SaaS, which is Software as a Service, we talk about it all the time on the podcast. It works for the online course people, it works for when you're selling templates, hell even Fiverr does it, right? The problem is it's horribly inefficient. Imagine getting less than a quarter for every visitor that comes to your website. So if you get 100 visitors per month, go look at your Google Analytics or Squarespace Analytics or whatever sites builder you use. If you get 100 visitors a month, that's 25 bucks you just made. 1000 visitors a month, that's 250 bucks. I've never seen a normal freelancer without a massive YouTube following. I've never seen one getting 10,000 visitors per month, but that's still only 2500 bucks. That's still only, what, $50,000 a year? $30,000 a year. Sorry, my math is bad. You're leaving so much money on the table when you do it this way. And I'm not going to throw him under the bus specifically, because he's still doing very well. So for him, it's an easy fix. But for you, it may not be. On this episode, I want to talk through the spectrum of sales models that can exist, everything from passive to asynchronous to synchronous. If you don't know what those are, we'll talk through them. But even a small shift, especially in this client's case, a small shift can be a massive increase to your average earning per visitor. And I'll talk about why I'm stuck on that specific stat in a second. But if you get your sales strategy right and create a very efficient sales process, you're going to have higher close rates. You'll be able to land bigger packages with better clients. You'll have more pricing flexibility. We'll talk about how that is in a second. You can filter out clients better, and you'll just have an overall sales process that supports your business growth versus actually holding it back. And if you were trying to get the multi-6 figures, this is wildly important. I cannot overstate how important this is, but even if you are just getting a few website visitors a month, 10, 15, 20, 100, a couple hundred a month, like an average freelancer, this is still a very important conversation. So whether you are making 20K a year and you're trying to get to 100K, or you're 100, trying to get to 250, or 250, trying to get to a million, doesn't matter. Sales efficiency, it's so important. I don't know how else to say it. If you've never heard of this show before, you've never heard me, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. This is a podcast for creative freelancers, and I guess more and more agency owners who want to make more without selling their soul. My background, I freelance for a decade. I have a couple of software companies. I now have this business 6 Figure Creative that have grown to multi 7 figures, and I obsess over sales efficiency. So I want to break this down in this episode. So just to recap this client, just so there's a basis for us to talk through this in this episode. This client has a YouTube following. It's a not a huge following, but it's a sizable one for this niche. He gets tens of thousands of website visitors per month. If I'm doing my math correctly, if he's listening to this show, this would be weeks and weeks after him and I had this discussion. So if I get some of the numbers wrong, my apologies, but I believe tens of thousands of visitors per month. He's got a very productized service. He just has two versions of this package, which is like maybe a Mixmaster kind of package, but there's very little difference. So it does lend itself to a self-checkout style, but he was pushing back on our advice to move to a sales call type model for his business. And the reason for that is because he wanted to have a very efficient sales process. If you can imagine if tens of thousand people come to your page, if you were offering sales calls to all those people, chances are you might be on sales calls all day long. So clearly he can't do that. But we need to balance your earning per visitor with your hours per sale. Those are the two things we're trying to strike a balance for in his business. And depending on the amount of traffic you have, the amount of leads coming in, you'll likely have to do a similar balance, especially for you multi-six figure freelancers or people trying to get them multi-six figures. So when this client is at 23 cents per visitor, but has zero hours per sale, that means he can give up a little more time on his hours per sale metric, on like how much time he can devote to a sale. This doesn't have to be a full hour, by the way. It could be minutes for that matter, like five, 10, 15 minutes, 20 minute conversation for a sale. But he can start to devote a little bit more time in order to gain more efficiency on his earnings per visitor. Because if you're getting, let's just call it 20,000 visitors per month, and you're getting 23 cents per visitor, that's only about five grand a month, little under five grand. But if you can get that to a dollar even, just get up to a buck. Again, we're over $30 per visitor. That's how efficient our sales process has become, our sales strategy. So getting him up to $1 is not out of this world. So just doing that one thing can shift him from five grand a month to 20 grand a month or more, depending on how many visitors he's actually getting right now. So there are levels of sales. You can call it a gradient, you can call it a spectrum, whatever you want. But there is the fully passive self-serve style that this client is doing, where someone comes to your website, they look at your packages, they hit, yes, I want this package, and they fill out their information, they check out, and then they've hired you for your service. Almost like you're buying a product on a website or subscribing to a SaaS plan at a CRM software company. That is the extreme passive side. And then towards the middle, there is something called asynchronous. That's where it's usually DMs or emails or something where someone's sending something to you, you're sending it back. You're not directly communicating in real time. It's asynchronous, but it does require a bit more time. This style usually works best when you have an inquiry form on your website. People fill in the information, so you have all the information you need. Otherwise, if they're just DMing you on socials or sending you a blank email that's like, hey, I want to hire you, how much is it? Then you have to send all the information you need from them back, and then they have to fill that all back and email back to you. So again, an inquiry form is the best way to do an asynchronous model. We'll talk more about that in a minute. So that's asynchronous. That's kind of the middle of the lane. And then there's fully synchronous. That's real time sales. That's where you're doing something like on a Zoom call, a phone call, or in-person sales meeting. And depending on you and your business and your niche and your offer, your package, and a whole bunch of things, there are pros and cons to all three of these approaches. So I'm going to start with the pros and cons of a fully passive sales process. Never had to talk through some of these, but it's worth reiterating here. The pros are this, low to no hours per sale. Again, it can be great if you had tons and tons of demand for your service, where you only have people come to your site and check out. It's also very convenient for certain buyer types. For example, not all people want to talk on a phone or have a sales conversation with somebody in order to buy something, especially for a lower price product. So in certain scenarios, the passive sales process is better for the client because they prefer it. But you have to be very careful about this because just because the client prefers it doesn't mean it's better for you. So that's where we get to the cons of this. The first con is very, very inefficient. I already talked about this. It's very inefficient, especially for service-based businesses. You got a very low conversion rates overall. You're going to have a lower average order value, meaning when they're self-serving, they're just going to choose what they think they want or what they think they need versus what they actually need. So for the example of this client, he's offering mixing services. A client comes to him. They're like, I want to mix one song. They check out on his site for one song mixed. When if he had a sales conversation with them in some sort, it could have been they actually needed two or three or four songs done. And you get to close all four in that one sales conversation. So lower average order value. When you do it asynchronous, you're going to have lower pricing because people generally don't want to check out on self-service for a multi-thousand dollar package. I don't know if you've ever put your credit card information for like a $3,000 purchase through a form where you've not talked to any human being, but it's kind of scary to do that. Most people don't want to do that. I want to talk to another human, especially for a service where another human being is going to fulfill on it. It's one thing if you're paying like three grand for a year of a software service, where you know the software is going to do the thing that you want it to do because you've already done a free trial or you've done enough research on YouTube or somewhere online to know it's going to do what it says it's going to do. But it's really difficult to try to pay someone three grand that you haven't even talked to before. So generally, people will go to someone that they can have a conversation with versus hiring you. And last on passive sales, I haven't really talked about this as much, but this is a huge negative is when you do passive sales, there's no client filtering. So whoever buys you have to fulfill on or you have to refund them if you don't want to fulfill on it, which is not good for either of you. And it's not fun for them either. And one more that I actually just thought through is with a self-serve checkout, you have to have public pricing. And I've talked about public pricing on this podcast before. It's been a while since I've gotten on this soapbox, but I hate public pricing for freelancers for a bunch of reasons. First is you get no leads. If someone is curious about your rates, they come to your site, they see the price on your site, they're just going to leave. They got their question answered. And the problem with that is they just are now a one or a zero on your website. They're a blip on Google Analytics. Unless you are doing retargeting, there's no way for you to show back up and follow up with them. And even with retargeting, it's up to them to come back to you when they're ready. Whereas, if you gate your pricing and you make them fill out an inquiry form in order to get rates, you now have the lead in your CRM and you can follow up until they say yes, until they say no, or until they die. One of those three things. Or until you die. So public pricing means you get no leads until they actually buy from you, which is again, one of the many reasons why it's such an inefficient sales process. There's also no price testing. You can split test prices, but it's more difficult or different prices for different avatars. So like in this case, he has a price for like indie musicians, the people who are actually going to check out on the page, and then he has a much higher price for label projects. And so if a label came to his page and saw half or a third of the rate that they're being charged for the same thing, they may have an issue with that. And also with public pricing, you can't do demand based pricing or what we call also dynamic pricing. When you're in high demand, your rates should be going up. When you're in low demand, you have a last minute gap to fill. Your prices should be coming down in order to avoid the opportunity cost of no work at all. So those are the cons. It's a long list of cons for fully passive sales process and a very short list of pros. But let's talk about the pros and cons of asynchronous model. This is a really good model that I ran this for years as a freelancer. This one's very viable, especially if you have enough traffic, enough inquiries coming in. But the pros of a asynchronous model, again asynchronous just for reminder, is someone filled out an inquiry form on your website. Now you have a lead in your inbox, here's your CRM, and you're doing the entire sales process just back and forth through email or through DMs or something that's like, I'm sending my stuff to them. They're getting to it when they get to it. They respond back to me, I'll get to it when I get to it, I respond back to them. That's asynchronous. So most of my freelancing career, I did asynchronous sales through email. I was not smart enough to do sales calls. I should have done sales calls, but it still works fine for me, only because I had a high enough demand for my services. The pros are this, it's a lower hours per cell compared to doing sales calls because to send an email, it's usually template based. Maybe you have a proposal you send out that might take a little time. If you're doing custom proposals through asynchronous sales, you might as well just do sales calls and then not send proposals. But all in all, it's a faster sales process than doing phone calls or synchronous sales. Another pro or positive to this process is you can do a bit more diagnosis before the prescription, meaning you can gather more information from the client, what they're trying to get, what their goals are, what they need, especially if you have a good inquiry form or pre-call questionnaire. But I call it an inquiry form in this case because there's no call after the form. If you have good questions in your inquiry form, then you can get more information about what they're looking for, why they want that, so that you're able to prescribe a solution that they need. So in this case, we'll talk about this later, when you prescribe a solution to the problem that came to you for, then you can usually prescribe the solution that is a little higher than what they think they need. Because people always underestimate how much they need of something. So this leads to higher average order values. I talked about this in the intro of the podcast. Hopefully you understand that. Asynchronous sales, you can also close higher end packages. So higher price packages. I did this for years where I was closing, I mean, I think my average order was like $1,500, but I was closing 5, 10, up to $15,000 packages through asynchronous sales. So it's possible, but not quite as easy as doing actual synchronous sales. Through asynchronous, there is some client filtering possible where you can say, hey, this client doesn't really seem to fit what I'm looking for. So I can say, this doesn't look like it's a good fit. I'm going to send you some other freelancers or some other studios, some other mix engineers, or some other web designers, whatever your service is, in order to make sure you're served. But I don't think I'm the right fit for this because I do X, Y, and Z type projects. It's not quite as good as doing real time conversations because a lot of times, advanced client filtering, especially when you're trying to do, again, multi six figures, when you're trying to work with higher tier people, or you're trying to scale up through a team, like if you're an agency, in that world, you want to filter out people who are going to be a pain in the ass. They can be a perfect fit on paper, but there's things that come up in the initial sales conversation, little red flags, that if you pick at those things and you dive into those things, you'll realize you don't want to work with this person. You can't do that through asynchronous sales, like email or through DMs. One more pro here with asynchronous sales is you can gate your pricing. With asynchronous sales, with email-based sales where people are filling on an inquiry form, now your pricing is behind a gate. So you can gather the leads, you can follow up with those people until they say yes, or until they say no, or until one of you dies. You can test rates, meaning I'm going to charge 600 a song for this specific client. I'm getting a lot of yeses now, I feel good. Let's test 700 a song, see if we can start getting that, right? And then finally you can implement dynamic pricing. I was doing dynamic pricing through asynchronous sales throughout my career as a freelancer, and it worked really well, where if I had a gap in my schedule, maybe a band or somebody canceled on my calendar, I could then fill up that spot at a lower rate, especially because I had non-refundable deposits. So that gap was already paid 40% by that client's deposit being lost. So now I could do a lower rate to fill that gap and still come out ahead. But also when people try to book way in advance, I would still have really high rates. So the highest possible rate you could pay would be further out in advance. And the short, the lowest rate you could usually pay is something last minute, where you're trying to fill a gap in my schedule. So those are the pros. It's a pretty good list of pros. Let's talk about some of the cons of asynchronous sales. It's still very inefficient compared to sales calls. My close rate for this was around 20%.