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

361. Multi-6 figure playbook pt 6_Sales Efficiency

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Brian: [00:00:00] One of my clients is a mixing engineer. He'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 a hundred percent 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.

Brian: A hundred percent there.

Brian: And we're essentially trying to get him to multi-six figures. I'm gonna put this as part of our multi-six figure series. 'cause 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.

Brian: Turns out just sending people to your website to self-check out 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

Brian: And the only difference is our sales strategy.

Brian: 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 [00:01:00] checkout page and then they buy, and then you fulfill in the service.

Brian: 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.

Brian: So if you get a hundred visitors per month, go look at your, Google Analytics or Squarespace Analytics, or whatever sites builder you use. If you get a hundred visitors a month, that's 25 bucks you just made. A thousand visitors a month, that's 250 bucks I've never seen a normal freelancer without a massive YouTube falling.

Brian: I've never seen one getting 10,000 visitors per month, but that's still only 2,500 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 gonna throw him under the bus specifically because he is still doing very well.

Brian: so for him it's an easy fix. But for you, it may not be, On this episode, I wanna 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.

Brian: But even a small shift, especially in this client's case, a small shift can be a massive increase to [00:02:00] your average earning per visitor. And I'll talk about why I'm, stuck on that specific stat in a second.

Brian: But if you get your sales strategy right and create a very efficient sales process, you're gonna have higher close rates.

Brian: 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.

Brian: And if you are trying to get to multi six 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, a hundred, couple hundred a month, like an average freelancer, this is still a very important conversation.

Brian: So whether you are making 20 KA year and you're trying to get to a hundred k, or you're a hundred trying to get to two 50 or two 50, trying to get to a million. Doesn't matter. Sales efficiency it's so important. I don't know how else to say you've never heard of this show before, if you've never heard me. Hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the six Figure Creative podcast. This is a podcast for creative freelancers, I guess more and more agency owners who want to make more without selling their soul.

Brian: My background, I freelance for a decade. I have a couple software companies. I now have this business six figure [00:03:00] creative that have grown to multi seven figures, and I obsess over sales efficiency.

Brian: So I wanna break this down in this episode.

Brian: So just to recap this client, just so there's a basis for us to talk through this, in this episode, this client. He 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 will be weeks and weeks after him.

Brian: 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

Brian: where he just has two versions of this package, which is like maybe a mix master 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.

Brian: and the reason for that is because he wanted to have a very efficient sales process. If you can imagine, you have tens of thousand people come to your page. If you are 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.

Brian: But we need to balance your earning per visitor. With your hours per sale. Those are the [00:04:00] 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 your multi six figure freelancers or people trying to get them multi six figures.

Brian: 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. It doesn't have to be a full hour, by the way, it could be minutes for that minute, 5, 10, 15 minutes, 20 minute conversation for a sale.

Brian: 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.

Brian: 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,

Brian: Again, we're over $30 per visitor. that's how efficient our sales process has become or our sales strategy. So getting him up to $1 is not outta this world. So just doing that one thing can shift him from five grand a month to 20 grand a month or more. I. Depending on how many visitors he's actually getting right now.

Brian: 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 [00:05:00] 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.

Brian: Almost like you're buying a product on a website or a,subscribing to a SaaS plan at a CRM software company that is the extreme, passive side. then towards the middle there is something called asynchronous. That's whereusually dms or emails or something where someone sending something to you, you're sending it back.

Brian: 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 blank email that's like, Hey, I want to hire you, how much is it?

Brian: Then you have to send all the information you need from them back, and then they have to fill that all back, an email back to you. So again, an inquiry. The best way to do a 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.

Brian: That's where you're doing something like on a zoom call, a phone call [00:06:00] or in person sales meeting.

Brian: And depending on you and your business and your niche and your offer and your package and a whole bunch of things, there are pros and cons to all three of these approaches.

Brian: So I'm gonna start with the pros and cons of a fully passive sales process. I've already talked 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 had people come to your site and check out.

Brian: 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.

Brian: 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 con of this. The first con is very, very inefficient. I already talked about this. It's very inefficient, especially for service-based businesses gonna have very low conversion rates.

Brian: Overall. You're gonna have a lower average order value, meaning when they're self-serving, they're just gonna choose what they think they want or what they think they need versus what

Brian: they actually need.

Brian: So for the example of this client, he's offering mixing services. A [00:07:00] client comes to him, they're like, I want to mix one song. They check out on his site for one song mixed. If you had a sales conversation with him of some sort, it could have been they actually needed two or three or four songs done, and he could have closed all four in that one sales conversation.

Brian: So lower average order value, when you do it asynchronous, you're gonna have lower pricing because people generally don't wanna 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.

Brian: Most people don't wanna do that. Wanna 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's gonna do the thing that you want it to do 'cause you've already done a free trial or you've done enough research on YouTube or somewhere online to know it's gonna do what it says it's gonna do.

Brian: 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 do 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 [00:08:00] filtering.

Brian: So whoever buys you have to fulfill on or you have to refund them if you don't wanna fulfill on it, which is not good for either of you, and it's not fun for them either.

Brian: 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.

Brian: 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 gonna leave ' they got their question answered. And the problem with that is they just are now a one or a zero on website.

Brian: 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.

Brian: 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 [00:09:00] inefficient sales process. There's also no price testing. You can split test prices, but it's more difficult.

Brian: Or different prices for different avatars. So like in this case, he has a price for like indie musicians, the people who are actually gonna 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

Brian: They're being charged for the same thing, they may have a, issue with that.

Brian: 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 or 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.

Brian: So those are the cons. It's a long list of cons for fully passive sales process. 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, I ran this for years as a freelancer. This one's very viable, especially if you have enough traffic and enough inquiries coming in.

Brian: but the pros of a asynchronous model, again, asynchronous, just for a reminder, is someone filled out an inquiry form on your website. Now you have a lead in your inbox, your CRM, and you're doing the entire sales [00:10:00] process, just back and forth through email. Or through dms or something that's like, I'm sending my stuff to them.

Brian: 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 worked fine for me only because I had a high enough demand for my services.

Brian: the pros are this, it's a lower hours per sale 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, it'syou might as well just do sales calls and then not send proposals.

Brian: But all in all, it's Faster sales process than doing phone calls or synchronous sales.

Brian: 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, whatthey need. Especially if you have a goodinquiry form or

Brian: pre-call questionnaire, butI call it an inquiry form in this case 'cause 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 [00:11:00] want that, so that you're able to prescribe a solution that they need.

Brian: So in this case, we'll talk about this later. When you prescribe a solution to the problem they came to you for, then you can usually prescribe the solution that they. It's a little higher than what they think they need. 'cause people always underestimate how much they need of something. So this leads to higher average order values.

Brian: 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 think my average order was like 1500 bucks, but I was closing five, 10, up to 15,000 packages through asynchronous sales.

Brian: So it's possible.

Brian: 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 isn't looking as a good fit. I'm gonna 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.

Brian: but I, I don't think I'm the right fit for this 'cause 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 [00:12:00] filtering, especially when you're trying to do, again, multi-six figures where 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 gonna be a pain in the ass, they can be a perfect fit on paper.

Brian: 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 wanna work with this person. You can't do that through asynchronous sales like email or through dms.

Brian: One more pro here with asynchronous sales is you can gate your pricing. with asynchronous sales, with email based sales where people are filling out inquiry form. Now your pricing is behind a gate so you can gather the leads.

Brian: 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 gonna 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.

Brian: 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, [00:13:00] 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.

Brian: 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.

Brian: so those are the pros. It's a pretty good list of pros, but 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% compared to synchronous sales, which you should be closer to 50% or more unless you're doing paid traffic.

Brian: If you're doing paid traffic, a lot of paid traffic, asynchronous sales, you're lucky to close 5% synchronous sales. You'll be closer to 2030, up to 40% for cold, depending on how good you are at sales.

Brian: And through Async, it's still easy for a bad fit client to slip through. So you can't filter quite as well as you can through synchronous sales. And so some bad fit clients are still gonna filter through because you weren't able to dig into [00:14:00] things more. So that's the pros and cons of the asynchronous model.

Brian: let's talk about the pros and cons of the sales call model, which is what I do in my company. It's what I recommend you do in yours, unless you have tons and tons of Traffic, which I'll talk about a solution for what we did with this client.

Brian: the pros of sales calls, which is the synchronous model. You're actually in sync with a person real time talking to them. About the project. The pros are you can command higher rates. It's just easier to get higher rates when you're talking to people one-on-one.

Brian: The high touch people feel understood. You're gonna have a higher average annual client value or higher average order value, whatever you wanna call it, where you can do upsells, you can do cross sells, you can sell more of the same thing much more easily, and a real time conversation. You will have higher close rates through sales calls unless you're really bad at it.

Brian: you'll have better client filtering, and then you can gate your pricing. Again, a lot of the same, pros here, but the negatives for sales calls are this more hours per sale. So if you close at 50% and it takes an hour for each call, it's two hours to get one client.

Brian: So that's two hours per sale.

Brian: other con is it can be more inconvenient for certain clients. So if you work with a really young demographic. Or you have a very low [00:15:00] project value and you're trying to talk to people who are really high up, where they're high earners or B2B space, but you're a small cog in a big machine, that can lend itself better to an asynchronous model.

Brian: For example, ifyou're graphic designer and you're making just basic designs for social media graphics or something simple.

Brian: It may be difficult for you to get the founder of a $2 million a year company on a call with you to talk through that project. Again, that's not the best example, but see what I mean? It's like at a certain level, the discrepancy between the.

Brian: person you're trying to get and the time they value versus amount of money that's at stake for this project. It just doesn't make sense to get on a call. I guess a, better example of that is I had a video editor who was doing a test project for me and it was like a $50 test project or something and wanted to get on a call and I was just like, no, I don't wanna get on a call.

Brian: I'm sorry. This is a $50 test project. I'm not getting on a call with you. So what do we do with this client? Again, this client has tens of thousands of visitors per month, so clearly he can't get on a call with every single person

Brian: Our advice to him was to have a hybrid approach, which you can do. A hybrid approach does work well. If you have enough website visitors. With enough traffic, enough inquiries, all those sorts of things. [00:16:00] Otherwise, you would just do sales calls. If you have really low traffic, really low inquiries, you shouldn't be concerned about, reducing your hours per sale or any of that stuff.

Brian: You just spend as much time as you can on the phone to fill your calendar up. But once your calendar is full and you have demand on people trying to talk to you about projects, then we need to start tipping the scales the other way. And that's where we implement a hybrid approach, something that implements.

Brian: Probably not self-serve unless you have a really low intro kind of package, which rarely works. Most people don't how to do that properly. So it would be a, blend of, gated pricing. So you have an inquiry form where if you're smart and you set this up correctly, you can have logic in the form where If they answer questions a certain way, it goes to your sales calendar to where you actually have conversations with the best fit people, so higher end people or bigger projects. Go to the sales calendar to book a sales call with you and lower fit projects or yellow light leads. Go to a thank you page.

Brian: It says, thanks, I got your information. I'll be in touch do deal with it through asynchronous methods through email.

Brian: Either way, before you talk to someone on a sales call or before you send 'em a price via email through asynchronous model, you have all the [00:17:00] information you need through a pre-call questionnaire or an inquiry form.

Brian: And you're able to decide with what you wannado. If somebody slipped through and got on your sales calendar, that wasn't a great fit, you can say, Hey, I've canceled a car. 'cause it doesn't look like we need to really chat about much. I wanted to give you some pricing and some information, some next steps.

Brian: If you wanna move forward, let me know and I'm happy to send you an invoice or whatever. On the flip side, if someone slipped through and went to your inquiry form and didn't get on your counter, but they're actually a potentially great fit lead. You can then just say, Hey, great. I looked over everything.

Brian: Looks like this would be a great fit. I have a few questions for you. you can click here to get to my calendar to book a time that makes sense for you so we can chat about your project so you can get those asynchronous leads onto your synchronous sales calendar and you can get those synchronous sales calls that shouldn't be there off your calendar and just go to a asynchronous sales.That to me is the perfect fit approach. It takes some tweaking because again, the questions on your pre-call questionnaire really matter. The logic stuff matters to make sure you set that up correctly so that bad fits are not getting on your sales calendar. Good fits are not going to your inbox.

Brian: But this is a relatively small change that makes a massive difference. Again, think about it, if you go from 25 cents per website visitor to a dollar or $2 or $5 per [00:18:00] website visitor, that is a massive increase. 25 cents to $2 50 cents per visitor is a 10 x increase on sales efficiency,

Brian: and that's why I think it's a pretty good stat to keep track of when it comes to seeing how efficient your overall sales process is. and then the next level of this is if you only do synchronous sales, like sales calls.

Brian: Now we analyze what's your earnings per sales call

Brian: that allows you to test all sorts of different fun things like pricing or sales approaches or whatever. But that's to advanced for this. we'll stop the conversation there, to recap, figure out what your earnings per website visitor is and then see where you are inefficient in your sales process.

Brian: And you can put a better sales strategy into place to where you have a hybrid approach or just a synchronous approach in order to up that. What's my earnings per website visitor? And the easiest way to get this number is just look at your income over the last 12 months. Look how many website visitors you had over the last 12 months.

Brian: If you have a strong social following, you could find a way to just throw Instagram page views in there if you wanted to, but I don't really think it matters that much. Keep it simple for yourself. If they're interested enough, they'll likely come to your website to look at your packages or look at your rates or look at yourmore about you or whatever you have.

Brian: But that's all I got for you. So if [00:19:00] you want us to help you set this up for your business. You can go to six figure creative.com/coaching. We will look at your business. We will come up with a plan to overhaul your entire business or whatever's broken into your business. We will pitch that plan to you.

Brian: And if you love the plan, we can move forward for coaching. And it's a month to month. Cancel any time. If you hate the plan, you can reject it. We part ways, you owe us nothing. I would say, we'll, part ways as friends per se, but we will part ways and you will be out. Nothing, that's, that's the best way of saying it.

Brian: Can we, we put a lot of work into these plans and. we can't make it work, then we're sad always. But again, six figure creative.com/coaching. Fill that application there and we'll be in touch.

Brian: That's all I got for you this week on the six Figure Creative Podcast. Peace.