The Entire Freelance Sales Process From Beginning To End | The Sales Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 285

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.

Hello, and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, hi, hello, welcome. Glad to have you here. This podcast is for you. If you are a creative freelancer, you offer freelance services, and you want to make more money from your creative skills without selling your soul, that sounds like you. You are in the right place. This is episode 285, which is kind of awesome, because I did the math on this, and I realized this podcast has been around for over five years. That's crazy to me. This episode is nothing special. It's not like the exact five-year anniversary. I think that was actually a couple of weeks ago. But when I saw the number, I was like, wow, this is crazy. Five years of podcasting. It doesn't feel like that, and also it feels like way longer than that.

Probably because of that weird COVID time bubble in 2020, 2021, where it just felt like the shortest and longest two years of your life.

But yeah, let's get into what we're gonna talk about today. The show today, we're starting a brand new series. I've just found that I really like series. For some reason, they're fun to plan out. They're fun to go like really in-depth in a subject.

And you can kind of pick and choose the areas that you think you need the most help in. This series is the new Sales Series. We're gonna talk through basically the entire sales process from beginning to end that a lead would go through when they're working with you. We're going everything from first, what is even considered sales, the lead qualification process, CRM set up, what to look for in a CRM, the discovery call, overcoming objections, proposal process, follow-up process, short-term follow-up, long-term follow-up, the closing process, cross-selling, up-selling. That's just what I have planned for the series right now, and I'll probably add to it as we go through this. I don't know how many episodes it's gonna be, as usual. Typically, these series run from two to three up to four episodes. Could be as many as five episodes, who knows?

But I will spend as long as I need to in each of these areas.

And maybe it's just a couple of episodes, who knows?

But I love the topic of sales. This is something that I've grown to love over the years, something that I used to hate. And honestly, I think most freelancers hate this subject. So this is probably something that a lot of you, if you hate sales, you need to listen to this episode because when you get good at sales, it becomes really, really fun. And this is a big hangup for many freelancers. And it's the reason you're leaving money on the table, missing out on projects you should have won, getting paid less than you should be getting paid because you don't have the confidence to price yourself where you should be, because you don't understand how sales should work.

And beyond the actual skill of sales, you're probably missing out on a lot of clients because you don't have the sales process dialed in, including a CRM and making sure leads and projects don't slip through the cracks. So there's a lot to get into this episode. Before I dive in, I have to talk about the fact that I just got back from Peru a couple of days ago. We actually flew home on Thanksgiving Day. If you don't care about any of this, you can skip ahead like three, four, maybe five minutes, and I'll get through this whole spiel of my trip. So some quick updates from that trip, because I'm not gonna go like super into details on this. If you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen some of my stories about a few things that happened here and there, but I definitely didn't go into details with anything. But I talked about it so much on the episodes leading up to this, and I bashed a bunch of episodes so that I didn't have to record episodes while we were traveling, and I never ended up actually recording while we were on the road for whatever reason. I just didn't work out some of the hotels or places we stayed. This wasn't great for doing content. But here's the highlights of our three-week trip to Peru for what we call like a work-cation. If this is your first episode, we do these like once, twice a year. We go out for an extended amount of time. We work while we travel. We started in Lima, Peru, where we got to experience one of the top 50 restaurants in the world. It's called Maido. I would assume it's a Michelin star restaurant if there are top 50 restaurant in the world. But it was one of the best meals we've ever had, if not the best meal we've ever had.