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

350. 7 Sales Laws

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Brian: [00:00:00] So last year, 2024, we completed over a thousand sales calls for six figure creative. between me and my team, even before that, overall, we've completed over 1600 sales calls. And so I've learned through trial and error, dealing with this, volume of leads, this volume of calls, this volume of followUps, this volume was dealing with the other human beings.

Brian: When it comes to sales conversations, I've learned through trial and error what works, what doesn't work.

Brian: I've made constant iterative improvements. Throughout that time period,

Brian: and I realized that most freelancers rarely ever have more than 40 to 50 calls a year. Myself included as a freelancer. the same thing. You don't have the call volume that a company like ours has,

Brian: so you're unable to unearth the amount of information that I've been able to 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. And Obviously surprise. Those are easier to close than when you're talking to strangers.

Brian: However, if you want a stable, predictable business in 2025 and beyond, you have to be able [00:01:00] to turn strangers into clients or You have to turn your business model into 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 and demand, and be able to turn those strangers into clients.

Brian: 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 it sells. He truly was.

Brian: And Wilson knows, I'm not gonna 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 of December. So for 2024, he finished that year at 150, 000. If he can turn it around, you can turn it around.

Brian: So I want to talk through the seven sales laws to follow with every single lead.

Brian: 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 generating and dealing with right [00:02:00] now.

Brian: And the point of all this is to help you become good enough. At sales as a freelancer, you'd have to be a professional sales master, but good enough at sales as a freelancer that you can turn more strangers into clients.

Brian: 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. couple of seven figure 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.

Brian: 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 run their business. And they're missing the big picture of how businesses can truly be run in a better way.

Brian: 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 [00:03:00] broken, right?

Brian: If I call these rules, you'd be like, oh, 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 gonna have a worse time.

Brian: You're gonna make less money.

Brian: 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.

Brian: 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. listen to us, but you don't follow everything that we teach, which is fine.

Brian: Obviously don't follow every single thing I've ever taught on this podcast. But a 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 a real time conversation. Not in an email, preferably not live chat, although that is better than email, but something where you can have kind of a back and forth conversation.

Brian: because you will learn so much more through 30 bomb sales calls in a row than you [00:04:00] ever will hiding behind proposal and saying 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.

Brian: 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,

Brian: 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.

Brian: 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?

Brian: 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 percent of the people that we talk to 80%. Really? If you close 80 percent of the people you talk [00:05:00] to one of two problems is true.

Brian: Probably both. One is your prices are too low to, 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 look that episode. If you want to find the backlog, it'll be at our show notes page at sixfigurecreative.

Brian: com slash three five zero. Oh, this is episode three 50. A fun benchmark.

Brian: 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, don't call it a script because you're not reading a word for word script. It's generally an outline of bullet points of things that you're going to discuss.

Brian: I'm going to 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.

Brian: 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.

Brian: 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 Ramosi. He's taught it in a million [00:06:00] places. I highly encourage you if you want to learn more about that framework, go look up some of this stuff.

Brian: 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 gonna Follow the short one here that I call the app a PP 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 a sales framework before, or you are doing it now and it feels awkward, it feels off, it feels weird.

Brian: This is common. It usually takes about 20 calls before you start to feel comfortable in it.

Brian: 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.

Brian: 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 [00:07:00] need is exactly what they need.

Brian: Sometimes clients come to you, they think they need one thing, they actually need another thing.

Brian: 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.

Brian: So it could be something like, Hey, I've worked with projects like that. You may see 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.

Brian: 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 this is a good fit. Here's what happens next. First is we're going to do scope. Next is timeline. Next is blah, blah, blah.

Brian: I can start on this date. How's that sound? The thing about this process is there's no fluff. There's no like 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.

Brian: And if you're wondering what button [00:08:00] seat means, it's pretty self explanatory, but that just means someone needs a button to seat. They need a video editor.

Brian: They need a mastering engineer. to shoot myself in the foot here, just naming too many 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.

Brian: I recently did a test where I was taking my, winning ads that 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 judge 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?

Brian: 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. went to our clients as well. I went to our podcast editor. I got a bunch of different people to do this.

Brian: But that's a button seat type service.

Brian: And what's funny is the most expensive one wasn't the winner. So

Brian: if you're a buncy freelancer, follow the app framework, APP, if you're a [00:09:00] transformational service provider, follow the closer framework. I'm going briefly go over it in this episode, just so you can have a good overview of what this is, but go look up Alex Hamozy stuff on the closer framework.

Brian: If you want to 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 launched 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.

Brian: 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, 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.

Brian: Easy one is just, hey, what's the biggest challenge you're facing with, whatever, with this project or with this thing.

Brian: 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.

Brian: 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 [00:10:00] resulting in A, B, and C. Does that sound right? Just so you're again, clarifying the problem and they understand that you understand them. If there's any sort of like disconnect here, this is a good time to figure out where the actual problem is.

Brian: there's a saying I like, it's like sell the hole, not the drill. And this allows you to really start thinking about that from a framework perspective here. So think about this. If I'm trying to sell a drill, I'm not saying, hey, it's got 5, 000 RPMs and it's got carbon bit head.

Brian: I don't even know what this shit is. I'm just making stuff up. it's got these adjustments on it. Sure, if you're like a drill nerd, maybe those things matter. But most people buy a drill because they want a hole in their wall so they can hang frames in their house. And so the point of this part of the framework is what is the actual hole you're selling?

Brian: Because the widget, the thing, the device doesn't matter. Your service doesn't matter. It's the outcome leading them to or the problem you're solving for them.

Brian: So once you've labeled them with a problem, you both understand that's the correct thing. You're both in the same page. Then you overview the past pain.

Brian: This is the O in the closure framework. The point here is to get them to acknowledge past frustrations that they've had with either past service providers or trying to solve the problem on their own or whatever.

Brian: It could also be past [00:11:00] frustrations about not having solved the problem yet.

Brian: So an example might be, hey, what did you try before? Why didn't it work?

Brian: Who did you hire before? Why aren't you going back to them? Etc. The point of this is to make them emotionally invested in finding some sort of new solution to this problem. Again, if they hired somebody before, still not a solution or they weren't happy with it. Find a better solution, something they're gonna be happier with.

Brian: Maybe you approach the problem through a different method, a different framework.

Brian: I know because in our own sales process, we have a similar thing where people have either gone one of two extremes. This is when we're trying to sell coaching to somebody, which is different and yet the same in a lot of ways when selling your services as a freelancer. But they either have done nothing at all because they have no accountability.

Brian: They don't know what to do. They're overwhelmed. And so we can. Talk about how everything we do is customized. It's one on one. We basically give you one thing to work on at a time. So you're not overwhelmed a bunch of stuff. You just know what your next step is. If you ever get stuck, we're here five days a week to help or the other extremist people have tried everything and none of it's worked.

Brian: And so we have to dig into why did the thing you've tried before never work? What were you doing wrong? What was the missing element? Maybe they joined courses where they had no one on one help. Maybe they joined some. [00:12:00] other coaching program where all you got was a weekly group call with a hundred other people and no personalized attention No plan you're working from you.

Brian: Just have a big long list etc, etc. So that's our example and I can talk about this all day But you have that own version in your business the things that they've tried before that didn't work or them doing nothing at all before and Suffering the consequences of that the S now for closer Sell them on the vacation not the plane

Brian: the story I've heard Alex talk about is like everyone wants to sell the trip, not the vacation,

Brian: or I guess in this case, the plane, not the vacation. it goes like this. If you're trying to sell on the trip, you're going to talk about for this trip, we're going to have to book the plane. Then we've got to get you to the airport four hours before, then we got to get you to the security.

Brian: You got to take your shoes off. They're going to frisk you. you're going to have to go find your gate, got to find a seat. Your airport's always has too few seats. you're going to be standing up most of that time.

Brian: They're going to cattle call you in different groups. You're going to show up. You're going to sit, you're going to get a middle seat, between two giant people,

Brian: you're going to lay over in Phoenix, Arizona,

Brian: where the air conditioning is broken and it's a thousand degrees, but eventually we're going to get you to Hawaii. How's that sound? That sounds pretty stupid when you, pitch it that way, but a lot of freelancers pitch their services that way. [00:13:00] Okay. First, we're going to do. A deep dive into your business and we're going to, figure out what is it about your website that's not working right now.

Brian: And then we're going to mock up a design in Figma they just basically sell them on all of that stuff instead of selling the vacation. Here's the selling the vacation part. If you sell the vacation, you're like, okay, Hey, Mr. Person, you want to go to Hawaii? So here's what we're going to do.

Brian: We're going of everything and here's what it's going to look like. Here's your vacation. You're going to show up in Hawaii. We're going to have a brunch set up for you and your family when you get there. It's going to be out by the pool. We're going to have welcome drinks for you.

Brian: We've got a cooking class because I know you and your wife love to cook, so we've got a cooking class ready for you. We've got a place for the kids to go while you're doing the cooking class. We've got a nice dinner planned for you and your family at this fancy restaurant. In the morning, we're going to drive you up to the top of a volcano to watch the sunrise and Then we're gonna take it down. We're gonna surf blah blah blah blah blah. You see how you're selling the vacation It's a much better feeling than the cattle herding process of getting out there I'm spending a lot of time on this because this is the common area most people mess up

Brian: and I'm not gonna pretend that the Process isn't important, especially for freelancers a lot of what your process is what leads to the outcome? But you got to make sure we are [00:14:00] selling the outcome not just the process if you talk process at all We've got to then get to how the outcome is going to be Solving the problem or helping them reach the goal.

Brian: They're either running away from pain or they're running towards pleasure.

Brian: one easy question you can ask here is, so looking ahead six months from now, what does it look like to have the problem completely solved for you? Or what does it look like for this project to be exactly what you envisioned or exactly what you wanted? A lot of times the client will sell themselves They'll give you exactly what they want to hear in this process. But I'm going to give you one important note here. This is almost like a sub law or a by law. I don't even know what a by law is. It's another law baked within this one law. And that is, on this part,

Brian: when you're selling them on the vacation, only pitch the solution to their problem. Do not give them multiple options. We've seen this with some of our clients. They do a great job in the sales process, but they say, okay, Mr. Customer, Mr. Client, do you want option A, package A? Do you want package B, or do you want package C?

Brian: An equivalent of that in this vacation analogy might be, do you want coach? Do you want business class? Do you want first class? Do you want a private jet?

Brian: And so there might be different ways to get [00:15:00] the same outcome. However, the discovery call, the whole point of this call is to figure out enough about the client. To give them the right one for them. And when you give people mobile decisions, they're less likely to make any decision at all. It's called decision fatigue.

Brian: They've done studies on this, do yourself a favor and do your client of favor and just give them one option. Later on, if you need to change the option up, you can, if there's pricing objections, because it's too expensive, we can find solutions to that by cutting away things or taking out things that may not be a hundred percent necessary or downgrading them from first class to economy if need be, but do not give them multiple options at this point.

Brian: Next section is E explain away their concerns.

Brian: This is where you handle objections and we'll talk more about objections later on in this episode because that's a big part of this, thing. because this is a big part of sales in general is overcoming objections, but we're trying to just address the fears and doubts that they might have.

Brian: And again, I won't talk about this right now. We'll talk about this later. And the final thing is just reinforce the decision. This is the R in the closer framework, make them feel confident in saying yes.

Brian: And the way Alex talks about this is this usually comes after the sale is made. They've already paid a deposit or they've paid the full amount or they've paid upfront some amount. They've paid something to [00:16:00] you at this point. Do whatever you can to make sure that they feel reinforced in the decision versus regretting the decision.

Brian: But the reason this framework works so well is it helps you identify the actual pain points your clients are experiencing, the actual challenges they have in their life or in their business or whatever it is that you do for them. It shifts the focus from price to value. when you sell the trip.

Brian: The focus is on the cost. When you sell the vacation, the focus is on the value.

Brian: And so when you really truly build the value of what you provide, it is easier for your price to come up to meet that value versus selling the trip and having to then justify why your price is so high later on. A good sales process, and this, can be adapted help a lot more with this, but a good sales process will pre address objections before they come up.

Brian: And again, we'll get to objections later on. A really good sales framework, and this is why most people don't do this at all, is it makes the process feel natural, not forced. It's a natural decision, not a forced decision. There's not pressure in this.

Brian: You can have a very consultative, authoritative approach to sales following this framework. It comes up to not just. What you say, but also how you say it tone matters a lot in this and it takes [00:17:00] practice But this brings me to law number two.

Brian: You followed some sort of sales framework You've gone through this whole closure for me, right? Law number two is always talk money on the call This is one that trip people up so much a lot of people resistant to this You have your own weird mental junk around money your own resistance to talk money on the call You want to hide it behind a proposal and you want to pretend like god There's no way and come up with a price on the call.

Brian: There's just like so many variables I've not seen a single situation where that's true, even in the most complicated pricing situations. There are always ways to make it modular. I've talked about modular pricing in the past, but it just means little building blocks of prices and packages that can be put together on the fly, on the call, even with a spreadsheet, with a helpful spreadsheet.

Brian: Sometimes let me look, this up really quick. Let me put this together. So based on what we're talking about, you need this, this, this, and this cool. So mr. Prospect or Mrs. Prospect. It looks like there's going to be around 8, 000 to get started. How's that feel?

Brian: Does that align with your budget? However you want to word things. But here's why we want to talk money on the call. Always, always, Always. actually in my opinion, even going a step further, not just talk money, ask for money on the call. Try to get a deposit. [00:18:00] Try to get Payton full, try to get whatever you can.

Brian: And the reason is many people will be polite and they'll be like, Oh, cool. Thanks. Send me a proposal, whatever. But when you actually ask for money upfront, ask for deposit and you have a good reason for it. Meaning like, Hey, I'm booked up three months, six months in advance. So I need to get a deposit and put you on my calendar for March for April, for May, for June, starting in June.

Brian: And based on your timeline that we talked about. We have to get everything started by May 15th in order to hit your goal, your deadline in June or July. So there's a good reason to ask for a deposit. But the reason we went to do this is because until you ask for money, you're not going to get to the real truth of what's holding someone back.

Brian: You're not going to get to the real objections.

Brian: If you want to learn as much as humanly possible on every single sales call, what you need to do, because most freelancers can't physically handle that many calls. Although we had one Merrick. One of our clients, we recently did a study interview on, he had 40 sales calls in a month.

Brian: That's an extreme case, but he did it and he learned a ton in those 40 calls. And he got good at asking for deposits, asking for some sort of payment up front.

Brian: But if you can't get to the truth behind someone's objection, again, [00:19:00] we're going to talk about objections later, but if you can't get to the truth of why someone isn't going with you, it's going to be very hard to solve that problem.

Brian: Smokescreen people could throw up at you as reasons why they're not going to go forward or reasons why they need to think about it or whatever. But there's really usually only one or two truths that's actually holding someone back. And if you can't find that actual truth, there's no way you can solve that problem.

Brian: That leads me to law number three here. And that is don't take objections at face value.

Brian: Common one is someone at the end of the call is like, Cool, can you just put this all into a proposal instead of my way? That is almost always a smokescreen. There can be some cases where someone actually needs a proposal to present to the board, or to bring in all the decision makers, or they need it for certain specific records because of the policies of the business.

Brian: But that's rare. Most of the time, it is the professional way of saying, Let me think about it. And the let me think about it. Objection is actually usually one of two other things, and we'll talk about it in a second. But let's talk about how you can handle objections, especially as a beginner.

Brian: You're like, you're not a professional salesperson. You don't do this all day, every day, right? So how can we give you an easy way to address objections? It's not going to force you down this [00:20:00] path of feeling like you're Wolf of Wall Street. Wolf of Wall Street is. It makes you feel gross, right?

Brian: Easy framework to follow is clarify and challenge. Simple, it's non confrontational. You're simply getting to the truth of what's going on, and you're challenging them on it, and you're doing it in a polite way. So if someone says, hey, can I get a proposal? Don't just say, sure, I'll send one, right? This is what most freelancers do.

Brian: Oh, yeah, let me bend over backwards and send you a proposal. I'll spend four hours on this. Say something similar to this. Hey, happy to put something together but just so I don't waste your time can I ask what specifically would you need to see in the proposal to feel confident to move forward? Or, another way of putting it, if you don't like that wording.

Brian: specifically do you need to see in the proposal? What are you looking for? This forces them to define what they actually need versus just using the send proposal as an excuse to think about it or politely delay. So ask the question, you're going to get more information here and then challenge the request gently.

Brian: If they ever give vague answer or seem unsure for some reason, Or slow to answer, that's usually a sign that it's a smokescreen. And if it's a smokescreen, that's where you need to politely challenge.

Brian: So something like this. I found that proposals are usually just a formality once you've kind of nailed out all the details and we're aligned on everything. So it [00:21:00] sounds like you might just have some questions. so just out of curiosity, what's the biggest thing holding you back from moving forward here?

Brian: The goal here is again, reveal the biggest hesitation, whether it's budget, it's trust timing approval from someone else. Other decision makers figure out what the truth is. Once we know what the truth is, then we can actually find ways to handle it. It could be that the sales process is just going to be proposal.

Brian: That's fine. But at least you found the truth.

Brian: If they find that it's a trust issue, it might be that your portfolio is just not matching up with what they're seeing out there, especially for the price to value that they're getting.

Brian: It might be a timing thing where you need to actually maybe readjust how you do your qualifying on the front end, asking questions in your pre call questionnaire to make sure that the timing is going to match up before you get on a call with them. That only really makes sense when you're at a higher volume of business where you can't afford to talk to people who are not ready yet.

Brian: So when you're slammed, that's a huge thing. If you're not slammed, you take any call whenever you can get it. But when you have the real objection, you can actually start to address the issues related to it.

Brian: Again, the goal is not to convince somebody here. It's just to uncover the truth and spot the patterns

Brian: because many times this can be handled ahead of time and the sales process before you even talk money. An example with a proposal thing is, this is early in [00:22:00] the sales process before you've talked to money, Alex says something like if it's a question that comes up before money's discussed, it's just a hurdle, is thing, the term he uses. If it's brought up after the money is discussed, it's a objection, So it's easier to handle hurdle than it is an objection. So early in the sales process, you might say something like, so just out of curiosity, What's your process for, working with freelancers like us?

Brian: Like typically how do you handle that?

Brian: And again, this is going to be so different depending on what your client type is. But I know in my, background in music production, when I'm working with bands who have five members, a manager and a label, it can be really complicated and challenging to navigate that conversation because.

Brian: There is truly more decision makers to be had. So when you learn the sales process, then you can start to build out a sales process that makes sense for your specific business instead of constantly hiding behind a proposal, because that's the way the client is basically delaying the decision. So that is law number three, do not take objections at face value.

Brian: Just follow the clarify and challenge. Framework there. Law number four is do make adjustments to yourselves, framework, yourselves, process to everything that you do after every [00:23:00] single call, at least for the first 20 to 30 calls

Brian: with our clients we ask that they have what we call a revisions list. So after every call, do your admin stuff, we'll talk about that in a second, but do all your admin stuff. And then, make note of everything you hated about that call that might lead to change. For example, I hated the way this wording felt.

Brian: hated how awkward this section was. Let's look at ways of adjusting this section. Let's just take this part out completely. Let's rearrange these sections over time. You will changes to this version one of yourselves framework. We're on at this point, version nine or 10 Over the last couple of years enough where again, I only give new numbers and we've made what I consider substantial changes to it constantly making changes as you learn more, as you grow, as you adapt, as you look at things from new perspectives, that only comes with repetition and that comes with keeping a revisions list after every call and actually making those changes.

Brian: So for the first 20 or 30, you should have. A list after every single call beyond that, it might be every one, two, five calls. Maybe you have adjustment that needs to be made, [00:24:00] but the whole point is you were making constant iterative changes to your sales process.

Brian: Law number five. This is a fun one. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.

Brian: Then trying to do calendar tags or email or text after the call is over. You can talk about it on the call. You can schedule on the call. That way it's in both your calendars. You'll have a high show up right on those. You will have more follow up calls booked. You will make more money.

Brian: There's no reason not to do this book, a meeting from a meeting. And this, honestly, this goes even above and beyond sales. If there's ever something you need to follow up with someone on after a call, instead of trying to decide after the call, when it should be doing it on the call, book a meeting from a meeting.

Brian: And that leads me to law number six. I love this one. Follow up with them until they say yes, until they say no, or until one of you die. That's basically it. Follow up with them until you get a yes, you get a no, or one of you die.

Brian: I've talked about this in great painstaking detail on the podcast many times, how as a freelancer, more than half of my income came from follow up [00:25:00] six or greater or something like that. I have the analytics or stats into some past episode buried. I may be a little off there, but it was like at least 40 percent of my income was follow up like six or greater.

Brian: But the problem is most freelancers follow up one time. If that many times they never follow up, you definitely don't follow up three times, much less six times. So if you want to make more money, you just follow up more times. So we have something we, teach our clients called the Fibonacci follow up

Brian: and this follow up is for when there is no follow up call booked. So if you book a meeting from a meeting law, number five. Then the Fibonacci followup doesn't necessarily make sense because the next meeting is the followup. So you don't have to worry about this. But at some point, the client will go away without wanting to or needing to book a call.

Brian: For some reason, there can be just things that come up, right? They can't do it, or they just, they truly do have to talk to decision makers or truly do have to talk to a spouse or truly do have to, get the budget together. Whatever it is, the meeting is not booked for the followup because there is no clear timeframe on when the project will move forward.

Brian: So that's where we get into the Fibonacci followup sequence. And here's how we do it. I'll give you the kind of like the thing we teach. I'm not going to give you every single word for word thing that we give clients, but I'll give you the [00:26:00] like how often you should be emailing here. this should feel extraordinarily aggressive to you.

Brian: And I promise you it's not it's easy to feel like you're overdoing it when you're the one sending these, but when you're on the receiving end of them doesn't feel weird at all, especially if you say the right things in the email.

Brian: So. First one is an hour after the call is done. Always follow up same day right after the call. Then you send number 2, follow up number 2, after day 2, then on day 5, then on day 11, then on day 17. On day 30, day 45, day 60, day 90, day 120. And so that is how many followups is this?

Brian: That is 10 followups in the first 120 days.

Brian: It's about four months. So these are pretty spaced out. And that's the whole about the Fibonacci sequence is the numbers get further and further apart, right? But at a certain point, we're not going to keep going with that. So what we do is we nurture them and check in every two to three months. So if you have an email list or you have a podcast or something where you're actually sending out regular.

Brian: Content to somebody, nurture those leads, right? We did a deep dive analysis on all of our numbers last year and it was like if someone had opened 25 or more of our [00:27:00] emails, they were like three times more likely to become a client of ours 25 or more of our emails opened They were like three times more likely to become a client of ours It was insane if somebody has opened 200 emails in our email list 30 something percent of those people are our clients.

Brian: So it's like email lists nurturing like that, that's just like a really easy way to measure and nurture. But social media is the same. People reading your posts and seeing your posts on social media, you just checking in with them regularly, but every two to three months, just checking in with them above and beyond whatever, like automated nurture stuff they're getting.

Brian: I should have clarified here. This is if it makes sense, you're a good fit for them. They're a good fit for you. They didn't say no. And there's no yes, so you're just going to keep doing this every two to three months. You're going to keep following up with them until they say yes, until they say no, or until they die, or until you die.

Brian: You will make so much more money if you just do this. It is dead simple with any CRM. It has reminders. You can do it through Siri. There's no good excuse not to do this. And that gives me the law number seven, the last law here. I got a visual to show you. So if you're on YouTube, you can see this.

Brian: If you were on [00:28:00] podcast, I'll visually describe it and I'll actually give you this resource as well. It'll be on our show notes page and I'll just give you a link straight to it. Log every single call.

Brian: If you're watching this on YouTube right now, you see what I'm talking about here. Here's a call log. We give this to all of our clients.

Brian: My team has used this to log over 1500 calls. Say over 1600, actually, we use this in conjunction with our CRM. So this is not a replacement of the CRM. the purpose of this is to keep everything in one easy to find place on a spreadsheet and to track your global numbers, your total calls, your total offers made, et cetera, et cetera.

Brian: All these things are done automatically up here. All you need to log are these specific things. So if you're listening to the show and you're not looking now, this is the stuff to follow.

Brian: After every call, you want to log the date of the call.

Brian: You log the date of the call, the name of the person, the email of that lead, the lead source. So whether it is a referral, it's a paid lead from paid ads, it's organic socials, it could be email lists.

Brian: It could be something else other, you can put unknown, but where did the source come from? If it's unknown, by the way, just ask your clients. We just actually added something on our pre call questionnaire of [00:29:00] Hey, where did you hear about us? And there's some interesting ones we're finding on my people say LinkedIn.

Brian: tons of people say the podcast people obviously say ads people say Google all the time And so it's giving me a better idea We just did this probably a week so ago But it's just giving me more ideas of where people are coming from so we can actually start tracking this better Track your call length.

Brian: So how long was the total call on our sheet? We track it in minutes And the reason we do minutes is because it's just easier for us to calculate averages and things So up here one of the things that auto calculates is your average calling This is helpful for you to kind of see where that's trending over time And the goal is can you maintain your close rates while getting your call time down?

Brian: You want to track your call recordings? So We have space for up to three calls. So if you have three calls in a row, maybe call number one is with the first call, the second calls with maybe the founder, the co founder, the CEO, maybe it's with the spouse, the partner, maybe call number three is they just had to think about it.

Brian: And if you're finally closing on the third call, usually just going to have one call, maybe two calls for a really complex business. Maybe you use the third call a lot, But you just put the call recording link directly on there so that you can go back and easily review [00:30:00] these if you ever have to.

Brian: This is obviously if you're only using zoom, if you're using like your phone or something or in person, you can't record these and that's fine. Then you're gonna look at the call outcome was an offer made if the offer is not made, you put, no, it wasn't made. And the reason we track this is if you're getting on the phone with a lot of people.

Brian: That you're not making offers to offer, meaning you're making an offer of working together. There can be times where you talk to somebody that's clear that it's not a good fit. And you're just like, man I promise you, I'm not the guy to do this. You can probably go to this person or maybe I can send you a couple of people in the email.

Brian: Who might be a better fit for this? I just don't do this sort of stuff, right? If you're getting on a call with a lot of people that you're not making offers to, usually you're having a qualification issue. That needs to be fixed, right? Next is the outcome of the call. Did you win it? Did you lose it? Is it pending?

Brian: And the third is, was the deposit taken? Did you take any sort of deposit? Yes or no. And then cash collected. How much money did you collect here? It might be you didn't collect a deposit, but you actually closed the deal in total, so you don't have to say deposit was paid. You just got the entire amount of money.

Brian: So 5, 000. Then we also want to track your energy or your emotions on this. So like. This is the way I do it, and some of my team does this, some of 'em doesn't. It's, a percentage, [00:31:00] like percentage of how I'm feeling, plus a quick thing. So in this year, I have a hundred percent feeling amazing.

Brian: 10%. My pet goldfish died 65%. I got a new goldfish. 80% life is getting back to normal. So from call to call, and this, gives you an idea over time how your emotions can impact. Your ability to close people

Brian: and also you'll start to see like what's happening in my life or in my sales calls when I feel Drained or my emotions are bad It can be that maybe realized, I'm Merrick again one of our clients who had 40 calls in a month He might find that 40 calls in a month is way too much and I'm drained by the end of the day I don't have the capability of talking to that many people And being able to fulfill my service.

Brian: So I'm never going to book that many calls again. It's a good month. Never do it again. And then finally the call summary, this is just a summary of what happened on the call or the notes you have about the call. Or the person, these should also be double entered into your CRM. So usually what we do after calls, we'll fill this sheet out first.

Brian: We'll type up all our notes, our thoughts, how it ended. And then we'll just copy and paste that exact same thing into our CRM notes under that lead, just so we have them in two [00:32:00] places. but that's the sheet. again, if you're looking here, it has plenty of space for plenty of calls and it calculates your lifetime, total calls, your lifetime offer made. Your lifetime offer percentage. So what percentage of the actual calls you're on, you offered your services to the total clients, you want the total calls you lost.

Brian: The total pending deals that are still just pending right now. So you can always be like, Hey, why do I have 15 pending deals? I need to go back and clean those up. It gives you your, offer to close rate. Meaning of the people I offered my services to what percentage of those that I close your overall closing rate.

Brian: So of all the calls I got on, what percentage of those calls were closed? Your average call length, your cash collected, the number of deposits taken, what percentage of your calls you got a deposit from? How many of those were won? How many of those were lost? How many of those are pending? And what percentage of deposits were closed?

Brian: Horrible experience, by the way. If you are listening to this podcast, but I wanted to kind of go over that sheet for my, viewers on YouTube, which is a small, but mighty group of people. So if you want this log or you just want to see this log, go to sixfigurecreative. com slash log L O G. we'll have that available for you.

Brian: And this to me, again, it's a law, every single call, you should have [00:33:00] this sheet or a sheet just like it to log every single call on one that preferably auto calculates all your metrics like this so that you can track close rates over time. And just fun thing to do also is

Brian: we actually duplicate the tab for every month because we're doing so many calls every month. You might want to duplicate your tab every quarter so you can track quarter by quarter what your close rate is how many calls you're doing each quarter or by year so 2023 2024 2025 do a new sheet or new tab in your sheet every single quarter or year or month if you're doing a ton of calls like us but again you can get that sheet at sixfigurecreative.

Brian: com slash log 100 percent free this is an asset we give our clients one of the many assets we give our clients And it is much better to just use ours than it is to try to build yours out on your own. I can promise you, we have gone through many iterations of this thing. If you saw the older versions of this when I first started, it is ugly as hell.

Brian: It didn't work well. I had fewer stats. And if you see the one we actually use internally with our team, it's even crazier than the one you have here. This is a simplified version, but the one we use our team is so much crazier. We track so many other metrics, because at the volume we're doing, I have to track more and I have to be able to stay on top of what [00:34:00] my team's doing or maybe not doing.

Brian: But that is it for this episode. Hopefully you found these seven laws enlightening. If you're watching on YouTube, comment, let me know what your favorite law was or which one you disagree with. Or. If you're listening, just reply back to the email you got from me. If you're on our email list, you've got the email for this episode.

Brian: Say, hey, Brian, I disagree. Why didn't you add this law? Or I disagree with this law. I am never getting on a sales call. Or I am not following up until someone dies. That is preposterous. Whatever your hot take is, let me know. I like to, get in the arguments with my listeners. fun arguments not mean stuff.

Brian: I won't argue with you. I'll just say you're right. I'm wrong. I don't know anything. Why do you listen to the show? That's all I got for you today. Thanks for listening. See you next week on the six for your creative podcast.