What 1,600 Sales Calls Taught Me About Closing Complete Strangers (7 Laws)

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 350

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. So last year, 2024, we completed over 1,000 sales calls for 6 Figure Creative. Between me and my team, even before that, overall, we've completed over 1,600 sales calls. And so I've learned through trial and error dealing with this volume of leads, this volume of calls, this volume of follow ups, this volume is dealing with other human beings. When it comes to sales conversations, I've learned through trial and error what works, what doesn't work. And I've made constant iterative improvements throughout that time period. And I realized that most freelancers rarely ever have more than 40 to 50 calls a year. Myself included, as a freelancer, it's the same thing. You don't have the call volume that a company like ours has. So you're unable to unearth the amount of information that I've been able to unearth over the last several years. Another common thing that I see with freelancers is you don't think you're bad at sales because you're actually so bad at lead generation that you only are talking to the hottest of the hot referral leads from your friends and family and past clients. Obviously, surprise, those are easier to close than when you're talking to strangers. However, if you want a stable, predictable business in 2025 and beyond, you have to be able to turn strangers into clients or you have to turn your business model into a recurring subscription business where you have those referral leads just stacking up. One of those two things has to be true. You either have to have a very good subscription model and enough referrals to keep your roster full or you have to get good at generating enough leads in demand and be able to turn those strangers into clients. And this comes from experiences that I've seen with our clients. I had one of our clients bomb 30 sales calls in a row. We got him leads. We got qualified people to talk to on the phone for his services. He bombed 30 in a row. He quickly learned how bad at sales he truly was. And Wilson knows. I'm not going to give the last name here, but we've done a case study interview with him. If you want to find out on the internet, he knows how bad he was. He texted me in December. So for 2024, he finished that year at 150,000. If he can turn it around, you can turn it around. So I want to talk through the seven sales laws to follow with every single lead. And again, these are things I've learned through trial and error over the last 1600 plus calls, plus all the calls and leads that our clients are generating and dealing with right now. And the point of all this is to help you become good enough at sales as a freelancer. You don't have to be a professional sales master, but good enough at sales as a freelancer that you can turn more strangers into clients. That is it. If you can turn strangers into clients, you figured out a big piece of having sustainability as a freelancer. So this is your first time listening to the show. Hi, I'm Brian Hood. I have had a decade of freelancing. I have since launched four or five, six other businesses. I've had five or six, six figure income streams, a couple of seven figure income streams, one multiple seven figure now. And I take all the lessons I've learned from all my businesses and what I'm seeing in other industries and what I'm seeing with the hundreds of clients that we're dealing with and what's working, what's not working. And I bring that to the podcast. Many freelancers make the mistake of just going to the direct people just like them, other photographers, other designers, other producers, other studios, as to how they should run their business. And they're missing the big picture of how businesses can truly be run in a better way. So think about it as diversifying your bloodline of your business.

If this sounds interesting to you at all, then you're in the right place. So let's get into these seven laws that I have here. I'm calling them laws because rules are meant to be broken. Right? If I call these rules, you'd be like, I can break that rule. Laws, you can break the law, but there's always consequences. And so I want you to think about these differently. If these are laws and you decide to break these laws, you will have consequences. No one's going to arrest you, but you're going to punish yourself. There are consequences. You're going to have a worse business. You're going to have a worse time. You're going to make less money. So I've got seven laws here. And the first one I want to start with is to me, one of the most foundational. Law number one is follow a sales framework. And actually, I'm going to give a bonus law here. This isn't one of the seven that I had here, but this usually goes without saying when it comes to our clients. But I also know that we have thousands of podcast listeners who may have just found us or you listen to us, but you don't follow everything that we teach, which is fine, obviously. Don't follow every single thing I've ever taught on this podcast. But bonus law here, before we get into this, is do sales through a phone call, like a consultation call, a sales call, or a Zoom call, or in person. Something where you can have real time conversation, not in an email, preferably not in live chat, although that is better than email, but something where you can have a back and forth conversation, because you will learn so much more through 30 bomb sales calls in a row than you ever will hiding behind a proposal and sending the proposal to the client, or just sending quotes through an email, and then wondering why they never got back to you, and never really getting any sort of feedback. So a lot of this episode is based on the fact that you should be doing sales calls. I'm assuming you're doing sales calls, or consultation calls, or discovery calls, or whatever you want to call them. And if you're not, then you're already hurting yourself. So law number one is follow a sales framework. So many people that we work with come to us, and they're just winging it on sales calls. And that's usually a symptom of somebody who has very few actual sales calls that they're doing. They're always referrals. They're always warm people that already know, like, and trust you, or refer to somebody that they already know, like, and trust. And so those are really easy to close. It's just, what do you need? Awesome. I can do it. It'll be this much. Cool. Here's the invoice. That's the gist of most sales processes for freelancers who are only dealing with the warmest of the hottest of the hot leads, right? And there's a reason why we have an episode on this podcast called Why a High Sales Conversion Rate is Actually a Bad Thing. People will brag about, we close 80% of the people that we talk to. 80%. Really? If you close 80% of the people you talk to, one of two problems is true, probably both. One is your prices are too low. Two, and this is the more common one, you're not generating any leads, so you're not talking to strangers. You're only talking to people who would close despite your best efforts of messing things up. So go back and listen to that episode if you want to find the backlog. It'll be on our show notes page at 6figurecreative.com/350, which is episode 350 Fun benchmark. But yeah, law number one, follow a sales framework. What does that mean? It means that on every call you are going through, some people might call it a sales script. I don't call it a script because you're not reading a word for word script. It is generally an outline of bullet points of things that you're going to discuss. I'm gonna give you two here on this actual episode so you don't have to go off and search the internet for the countless, endless amounts of sales frameworks to follow. One is a simple one that is built for what I call button seat freelancers, and that's where you have a very straightforward thing you're selling, and you're not going to be on a consultation call for an hour with someone discussing the project. It's 10, 15 minutes tops, but it's better than nothing, right? The other one I'm going to give you is one of the favorite ones that I have for clients to learn, and that is the Closure Framework. That's by Alex Hormozi. He's taught it in a million places. I highly encourage you, if you want to learn more about that framework, go look up some of his stuff. It's probably not one-to-one relevant to every freelancer, but every single element can be adapted perfectly to your needs. I haven't seen a client yet who couldn't implement something like this, but if you are a button seat freelancer, you're going to follow the short one here that I call the App APP Framework, and the second one is the Closer Framework, if you're a transformational service provider. Either way, here's an important note. If you've ever tried to follow Sales Framework before, or you are doing it now and it feels awkward, it feels off, it feels weird, this is common. It usually takes about 20 calls before you start to feel comfortable in it, but the reason this is so powerful is that it makes sure you never leave anything out, and you have a repeatable process. And the Closer Framework specifically is set up to turn strangers into clients. But the first one is for button seat freelancers. This is an easy one to go through. APP, the App Framework, the first one is assess the need, just clarify, figure out what the hell they need. What is the assessment here? Easy question, what do you need help with? What do you need? What are you looking for? Keep it straightforward, don't deep dive, just enough to confirm that what you think they need is exactly what they need, or what they think they need is exactly what they need. Sometimes clients come to you, they think they need one thing, they actually need another thing. And then you can always ask whatever clarifying questions you need to fully understand what they're coming to you for. The second thing is P, prove it. Prove that you can actually do it. So talk about the past clients you've worked with, or the past projects that are similar to the client you're talking to. So it could be something like, hey, I've worked with projects like that. You may have seen it in my portfolio. Here's one of the projects that I worked on just like that. If you're on a Zoom call, you can screen share. If you're in person, you can show it on your laptop. If you're in a phone call, you can text it to them. And then the final P in the app process here is plan. Just make it easy to move forward if it makes sense. Okay, awesome. It sounds like it's a good fit. Here's what happens next. First is we're gonna do scope, next is timeline, next is blah, blah, blah. I can start on this date. How's that sound? The thing about this process is there's no fluff. There's no deeper conversations. There's no pre-objection handling. It's very simple and straightforward. It's not complicated. And honestly, if you've never followed any sort of sales framework before, this might be a decent one to just get started with so you can do something while you're working on a more complicated one like the Closer framework. But this is about more for button seat freelancers. And if you're wondering what button seat means, it's pretty self-explanatory, but that just means someone needs a button to seat. They need a video editor. They need a mastering engineer. I'm gonna shoot myself in the foot here, just naming too many of these examples. But if I can find your service on fiverr.com for a very low competitive price at a relatively high quality, chances are you have a button seat service. It's not a transformational service. I recently did a test where I was taking my winning ads that I run, I put hundreds of thousands of dollars behind ads on Facebook, or Meta, which is Instagram and Facebook. And I took my winning ads and I got editors on Fiverr to zhuz them up, make them fancier, do more graphics and sound effects and all the cool things that I've seen in other people's ads with the question of, is this going to make things better or worse conversion wise? Long story short, it actually made things convert worse. I'll talk about this in another episode in the future and what I did instead. But the point is, I went on Fiverr. I found people who made good edits. I went to our clients as well. I went to our podcast editor. I got a bunch of different people to do this, but that's a button seat type service. And what's funny is the most expensive one wasn't the winner. So if you're a button seat freelancer, follow the app framework app. If you're a transformational service provider, follow the Closer framework. I'm going to briefly go over it in this episode. Just so you kind of have a good overview of what this is. But go look up Alex Homozi's stuff on the Closer framework if you want to know more about this. He has visuals. I think he has maybe a course that has some lessons on this. I'm not sure exactly. I know it's in his book, Jim Launch Secrets, which is one of my favorite books of all time. But Closer framework stands for these words. It's clarify the problem, label them with a problem, overview the past pain, sell them on the vacation, not the plane, explain away their concerns, and reinforce the decision. Those are the six kind of parts of this framework. And every business is going to be different. You have to come up with your line of questioning for each of those sections. But I'll go through each one really quick. So first one is clarify the problem. That's the C. You're trying to ask questions to uncover the real pain points. Easy one is just, hey, what's the biggest challenge you're facing with whatever, with this project or with this thing. When you know what the problem is, the true, like the deeper root cause problem of the issue, then you label them with a problem. You reframe their issue in a way that makes them feel understood. So something like, so it sounds like this problem is holding you back from this goal. Is that right? Or it sounds like you're experiencing X, Y, or Z, which is resulting in A, B, and C.