What I Use Instead of Proposals (And Why It Works Better)

380. Stop Sending Proposals

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Brian: [00:00:00] Are proposals killing your business? probably not, probably not the case, but they're definitely not helping your business.

Brian: In some cases, they're actively hurting your business. You think that they make you look professional. You think you need them in your business to actually get clients. But except for very few rare cases where you're actually submitting an RFP, they're the reason you're probably not closing as many clients as you could be closing.

Brian: so in this episode, I'm breaking down why traditional proposals are a massive waste of your time. What to do instead, and how to close more projects without writing these 10 page fancy pants proposals that clients sometimes don't even read, and then other times they do read and they just ghost you and you never hear from 'em again.

Brian: Now, not only have I helped hundreds of clients get through this whole proposal trap problem and get to the other side of it and create a real process that actually closes clients, I've spent years sending proposals like an idiot before I found out a better way to sell. And I lost out on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of paid projects that I could have gotten had I known what I was doing.

Brian: So instead of you doing the same exact stupid thing that I've done, just learn from my mistakes. Learn now. So you save yourself the money and the heartache. and as a bonus I'll even show you [00:01:00] how you can turn, what was your proposal into a paid product, especially if your service is very customer complex.

Brian: And even if it's not customer complex, you can still do this. if you're new here. Hi, I am Brian Hood. This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, episode 380. Good God, so many episodes you got a lot to catch up on if you're new here. this podcast is for creative freelancers like you maybe who want to earn more money without selling your souls. On this podcast, I take a lot of influence from a lot of different industries and best practices from other industries of people that are smarter than us as creatives and freelancers.

Brian: 'cause we're not very smart when it comes to business. Sorry. And I take that and I apply it to creative freelancers and what works in our businesses so that you can earn more money. usually without selling your soul, sometimes you have to sell your soul a little bit for the short term so you can make more money and long term without selling your soul.

Brian: But that's a whole other conversation.

Brian: Before I get into the topic today, there's a very important announcement for this podcast. You may have already noticed it if you're watching on YouTube, if you're not watching it on YouTube, I'll just describe it to you behind my left shoulder. You're right, if you're watching on the screen right now is a beautiful silver trophy.

Brian: It's called the Geiger, and what this signifies is that I am the champion of blast season'sfantasy football league. [00:02:00] this is actually my third time winning this trophy. I am a three time champ, the only one in my league. and I also have a wonderful shirt on commemorate this.

Brian: So if you're wondering, I'm wearing this or talking about this, it is the start of the season right now. So this will air after the football season started. I don't care about NFL whatsoever except for fantasy football in my shirt,which I'll show it to you, and I'll describe it to you if you're not watching on YouTube right now.

Brian: It just says fantasy football, and it has a wizard carrying a football and a staff and a little gnome running next to each other, and it says

Brian: it's real if you believe it. Adorable.

Brian: So for my fantasy football fans out there. Welcome to the show. You're listening to a three Time Champ, so you know you're in good hands. All right, let's get, let's get into this stuff. First of all, let's talk about why freelancers even lean on proposals in the first place, because a lot of you, this is

Brian: your comfort thing. It is your comfort blinky. It's your blinky, your proposals are your blankie. You don't wanna lose your blankie, right? Sometimes it's probably best to lose your blanky before you start like, do you wanna bring your blanky on a date to your wedding? We gotta ditch some blanky at some point.

Brian: So first of all. Freelancers lean on proposals because that's just, I'll say it in the accent that it [00:03:00] deservesbecause that's just how it's always been done in my industry. if you've, if you've listened to this podcast before, you've heard me talk about something called the Inbred Business, that is where you just look to the tiny little ces.

Brian: Of just your neighbor to the left and to the right, or just your cousin to the left and to the right for how to run your freelance business. And when I say cousin or neighbor, I just mean likeliterally other photographers, literally other videographers. Literally only other graphics, literally only other music producers.

Brian: You only look to the people in your little circle for how to run your business and oh, Bobby, at the studio down the road, Hey, you just changed his proposal, so I'm gonna do the same thing. Deborah, she sends proposal. So I'm gonna do the same thing. And that's all you ever do. And so that results in what we call an inbred business.

Brian: You don't have a diverse gene pool. we don't want an inbred business. We want a good, healthy, diverse genetic gene pool.

Brian: But some of you, you know better. You know that you shouldn't send proposals, but you still do it because you have no idea how to run a real cellsprocess. Now, we've had tons of podcast episodes about this in the past.

Brian: I will just give you two episodes really quick if you're like, Hey, I suck at sales. I should probably learn this episode 350, what? 1600 sales calls taught me about closing complete strangers.

Brian: Or episode 361, he had 20,000 website visitors in a broken sales process. two good episodes [00:04:00] to kind of dive into ifyou suck at sales. But that's the second reason you lean on proposals is you just don't know how to run a real sales process.

Brian: And the third reason is you know how to run a real sales process, and yet you still send proposals. And, you know, you shouldn't send proposals, but the only reason you still send proposals is the fear of rejection. It is so much easier to just say, cool. I'll send you a proposal and then run off to your little dark cave and get your little Cheeto fingers on a keyboard, and.

Brian: I'm gonna send that proposal, your little troll voice, your little Tite cave creature,and then just send it off instead of actually being a human being and talking to your client, oh God, who, who,who would've thought about talking to your client. That would be a better way of doing it. But those are like the, general reasons why freelancers lean on this.

Brian: It's either ignorance, you don't know how to do better or just fear. Fear of rejection. But let's talk about why proposals suck.

Brian: just some like formalized points of why I think proposals suck. First is just one way, monologue kind of alluded to it earlier. You're in your damp dark cave like schmiegal. Just sitting in that weird, um, the animated death note where he's just like sitting in the chair with his feet up on the chair, his toes exposed, really creepy.

Brian: If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it.

Brian: If you know, you know, just typing up the proposal and you're just crafting [00:05:00] this in your mind, a masterpiece that's gonna blend the client, and it's basically your brain dump of how you're gonna help this client out. And it's one way. There's no two-way dialogue. There's no conversation here.

Brian: That alone should show you how flawed it is because the more complex it is, the less likely this is going to actually work, and the less likely you're gonna be able to convert somebody through proposal with no actual conversation. Second reason proposals suck is it's wasted time.

Brian: Especially if it takes forever, times. There's very few instances I've ever seen where a proposal makes more sense than doing an actual, good discovery call process.So if you can talk to a human being 30, 45 minutes, an hour long conversation and actually get through the actual pitch on the call, which I'm skipping ahead here, but if you can actually do that, that means you can likely close a client.

Brian: That timeframe. There might be some follow up. There might be some conversations still had after that, but it's wasted time going off and spending hours and hours crafting some crazy complex proposal.

Brian: And even if, let's just say for example, it takes you 10 minutes. You have like the,proposal template, you change out a few little parameters. You have a very productized service. It's easy to make a [00:06:00] proposal. You're like, ah, it takes me no time. It's not a big deal, Brian. It's not a waste of time. It still sucks because you're hiding behind it.

Brian: If you skip the sales call, that's the worst. Or you do the sales call and then you send the proposal instead of talking numbers, an actual pitch, that's not as bad. It's still bad. You never find the actual true objection. the true objection is the thing that's holding you back from actually laying on the client.

Brian: And so there's always gonna be people you talk to that no matter what you close themdespite your best efforts of fucking yourself over, you still win the project. I've seen this dozens and dozens of times.

Brian: I've seen this on sales calls that re-reviewed from our clients. Despite your best efforts to suck, you still get the client. You're always gonna get those. So that could be proposal, it could be discovers call, you could suck at sales, whatever. You'll close those clients. and then there's those clients.

Brian: No matter what you say, no matter what you do, no matter what you offer, no matter how cheap you go, no matter how you try to close in proposal, you do sales calls, you're a sales master, whatever, you won't close 'em no matter what. There's just a 0% chance of close no matter what because of circumstances outside of your control.

Brian: Okay? those are the two extremes. But then somewhere in the middle.Those are the fence sitters. Those are the people that could go either way, and those are the people that through a good [00:07:00] proper sales process, a two-way dialogue, you can actually get those people over the fence to say yes, or you could push them away and they say no.

Brian: Or even more common is they make no decision, which is always a no by default.

Brian: so by never finding the true objection, the true reason they said no, or made no decision, you're never able to fix the root cause of why you're losing clients. So all those clients that ghosted you, there is a reason why they ghosted you. You have no idea why, and there's nothing more frustrating than someone to ghost you, and you have no idea why.

Brian: And you just wonder, is it me? Is it the way I look? Is it my service? Is it my talent? Is it my pricing? Is it my competitors? What is it? Because you hid behind the proposal, you'll never figure it out. You'll never learn. You'll never grow. You'll never get better. And all of that leads to the number one reason proposals suck.

Brian: And that is lower conversion rates. You only have so many at bats. you maybe only have, let's say five, 10 inquiries a month. What percentage of those can you close?

Brian: I'll add one little caveat here. Those of you who are like, ah, I granted close like 80% of my clients with proposals, and to that I just say [00:08:00] you're probably having one to two conversations a month if that. You're probably only getting referrals. The people that have said yes, no matter what, if you're closing that many people.

Brian: I have an episode for you to listen to

Brian: go back to back in episode 224, why your high sales conversion rate is actually a bad thing, something like 2022. Good Lord, that's a wonderful episode for you. Go listen to that, and if you wanna find these episodes, by the way, if I give you an episode number, you literally just go to six figure creative.com/the number so slash 2 2 4 in this case, it'll take you straight there.

Brian: It's really easy. I want you to listen to this show. I have so many episodes on the backlog, so much of my time wasted if you don't listen to it. So go, go listen to it.

Brian: So that's why proposals suck. Let's talk about the anti proposal sales process. What does this look like? It's four steps, I think. Maybe the bonus will be hidden in here somewhere, but there's four steps to this. The first step is very simple.

Brian: I've talked about this before, it's pre-qualified clients. Before we get on a call, we wanna shift, by the way, if this is not painfully obvious, we're gonna get to a discovery call with your clients and. We're going to actually piss them on the discovery call. We could tow all that in a second, but before you get on a call with 'em, we need to qualify them.

Brian: 'cause we [00:09:00] don't just jump on the call with anybody once your time.

Brian: before you ever get to a,call, you send 'em to what we call a pre-call questionnaire. You can call your inquiry form, but it's basically answering the questions of what do I need to know about this person to know if they're even potentially qualified. Can I help them? Do they need my help?

Brian: There's an episode for you for this. It's called, BANT for freelancers, the Secret BS detector for bad leads. It basically filters out the bad leads. It's episode 368. So again, you can just type in six figure creative.com/ 3 6 8 to get that episode. But it's a very simple process.

Brian: Just create a pre-call questionnaire, send them through that, and that way you have some basic information and you know, if they're a goodfit or not. You at least know if they're a bad fit before you get on a call with em. This is especially important when you actually start marketing your services and you're trying to turn strangers into clients versus just getting referrals from everybody, even with referrals.

Brian: You still wanna do this second step. Learn how to run a collaborative discovery call. is a two way street. Now, I have plenty of podcasts episodes about sales. There's more in depth stuff about this if you want, but I'm gonna talk about some things that are really important at the core here.

Brian: I want you to think through mapping out what's called a question based sales framework. This is what Alex Ram Moey does with every [00:10:00] sales team that he trains. If you don't like or don't know, Alex Ram Moey, I forgive you, it's okay. You don't have to like or know him, but the man knows sales and in his mind, the reason he likes question based sales frameworks is because question based sales frameworks are the easiest to train.

Brian: If it's the easiest to train, that means there's consistency, and that also means it's easier for you to learn. So if you're a freelancer, you're like, I don't do sales, I'm not good at sales, fine. Do you know how to ask a question? Realistically, a lot of people don't how to ask a fucking question. God, I'm gonna rant for a second.

Brian: How many times have you been in a conversation with somebody new and they don't ask you a single question about yourself? Start to notice that next time you talk to people that just don't know you. How many questions do they ask you that tells you how good of a person that is? If that person asks you no questions, stay the fuck away from them.

Brian: If they ask you questions, they're curious about you, your life, anything about what you're doing or the context in which you're around each other as it pertains to you and ask you questions, probably somebody worth exploring friendship with or a relationship with or whatever. But people who don't ask questions, I stay away from those people.

Brian: There's none of those people in my life. But questions show that you care. That's why my [00:11:00] hot take rant there. Questions show that you care but it's also really helpful when it comes to actually being able to close clients

Brian: because when you ask questions, you're able to figure out what's wrong that you can fix, and whether you can help them or not. And it is much easier to just simply ask questions and let your client talk, your potential client talk than it is to try to just pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch. Sales conversation, by the way, is mostly questions.

Brian: there's so many AI tools out there that like analyze sales conversations and we have thousands that my team have been through and we'll review them and we have the AI tools, like 70% of the call is just questions. It's just questions being asked to learn about the person.

Brian: So it's a question based sales framework, and there are two major parts to this. There's a lot of little micro parts, but two macro parts. maybe three macro parts. We'll get to the third in a second, but two major macro parts. Diagnose and then prescribe, diagnose, and then prescribe.

Brian: And the,quote that I heard a million times is, prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. If a doctor just gives you a prescription and does no sort of diagnosis for you, that is malpractice.

Brian: So the first goal that you should have with any sales conversation is just diagnosing the problem that your offer solves. [00:12:00] And if you don't know what offer means in the context here, go buy a hundred million dollar offers by Alex k Moey, it's great book. Or you can just keep offering your service, whatever you wanna do.

Brian: Either way you have an offer. It either sucks or it doesn't. Services don't really sell well, offers sell pretty well. A hundred million dollar offers sell incredibly well. But either way, we wanna diagnose the problems around what you actually can help them with. So we're not gonna be asking questions about, how's the kids, how's your job doing?

Brian: How's mom and them? wanna, You wanna ask questions that are specifically related to what problems you solve.

Brian: if you think through, like if you go to the doctor's office for a condition that you have, they're gonna ask you a bunch of questions or perform some sort of tests in an effort to uncover what problems that you have and realize that, oh, it's actually not this problem. So this over, I've seen a million times, 'cause I've worked with a billion people, and every single one of these things are leading to this being the problem.

Brian: If the doctor asked like two questions and then give you a major diagnosis for like surgery, you'd be like, hold up. No, no thanks. But the amount of questions being asked and the diagnosis portion should be

Brian: more [00:13:00] intense for a more intense solution or prescription. In other words.

Brian: so as you ask questions and uncover their pains, just repeat it back to them in your own words. It's called labeling the pain. ask a question, tell me more about your current website.

Brian: tell you about the website, the tell match. It sucks. Okay? So you hate the design. Labeling the paint. Oh yeah. I hate the design. So what are some of your goals for this? Cool. You want better conversions. What are your conversions right now? What are your conversion rates on your website right now?

Brian: Aha. Abysmal. So you have like 2% conversion rates. That's really, really bad. Okay. not happy with that. Okay, cool. That is an example of just like simple questions around the problems or the pains or the goals. Some services I will, a hundred percent say. Are more goal-based than pain based In my background in music production, music producers are not really solving a pain in a lot of cases.

Brian: Sometimes it can be around songwriting and production elements and things like that where there's pains that they can't get the sound that they want outta their head. but it's almost always it a goal-based cell. Where they're trying to get someone towards a goal, not so much away from pain. Now there's, if there's ever a goal, there's pain associated [00:14:00] with, if you ever have a goal, you're running away from some pain associated with, if you want to get fit, you're run away from being fat. If you want to get rich you're running away from being poor.

Brian: Like no matter what, there's a goal, there's something you're running away from that's painful.

Brian: But questions can uncover both sides of this. And you really have to think through what questions make the most sense as it pertains to your specific service.

Brian: But once you fully understand the pain, the goals associated with it,

Brian: and you found what's called the gap, it's the point between. Point A where they are now, point B where they want to be. Where's that gap? Once you have that gap, you know the prescription in order to bridge the gap and that prescription if it's the right fit for you. Obviously not all clients are gonna be the right fit for you, but if it's the right fit for you, the prescription should be your service or your offer.

Brian: Or if you have something very complex, a combination of your offer, the building blocks of what all you can do, put together specifically uniquely for that specific client to solve the problem.

Brian: And this is where it can be very tempting to just send a proposal to the client. Cool. Mr. And Miss's client, I think I totally understand everything. Thanks so much for sitting on the phone with me for the last 45 minutes. I'll go off to my dark cave, sit in my [00:15:00] weird sagal position, type up a proposal to you.

Brian: Why I profusely sweat.

Brian: And I am alt tabbing over to Reddit boards to bash people fun, because that's just what I do. And then I'm going to send you the proposal as soon as I can.

Brian: Resist that temptation. Resist the temptation once you understand the problems. Instead, simply walk them through their diagnosis and make sure that you're both on the same page.

Brian: Something like this. Hey, just to make sure I'm understanding everything correctly, this is what I'm seeing. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Is that right? Okay. Got it. So based on what you told me, this is definitely something I can help with. Do you wanna know more about how that would work? Something like that. Just some question like that. And from there, you're simply prescribing your service. You've asked permission to essentially pitch them, but it's not a pitch. That's the thing I need you to get outta your head. Pitches feel slimy and gross.

Brian: But prescribing a solution, when a doctor's like, Hey, so yeah, you've got, um.

Brian: ganglius. I hope that's not a real thing. I'm just, I think I'm making this shit up. You've got Ganglius. a rare pathogen is eating away at your pancreas. And, yeah, it's pretty serious.

Brian: You'll be dead in six months if you don't do something about this. [00:16:00] Oh, God. So what can we do? Yeah. Yeah. Let me just, uh, I'll get a, a proposal together for you and send it off like, no, like the doctor's, like, yeah. So this is gonna be, we can definitely help with this no problem at all. But it's gonna take quite a bit.

Brian: Do you wanna know more how kind of how we can help? You're just like, God, yes. Like, please, I don't want to die in six months. I don't want my pancreas to be eaten by this rare pathogen in gang colitis. What can I do? So in this case, the doctor's gonna just prescribe. Cool. So here's what we've gotta do.

Brian: We've got to change your diet. We've got to start exercising more. We've got to take these prescriptions, and in three months, if it's not better, we may have to have surgery. Cool. You just got pitched essentially. Did that feel like a pitch? No, because you're trying to save someone's life, and that's the mindset shift you have to have in your own business.

Brian: When you're pitching your clients, you are simply prescribing. A solution to the problems that they just spent 45 minutes dumping their hearts to you on. Maybe there's not any heart in it. If you're B2B, they're just like, yeah, this is the problem I have a box that I put money and time into and I want more money on the other side.

Brian: So can Mr. Freelancer, can you fix this? And you're like, yeah, there's [00:17:00] no heart in that whatsoever. You're a sold your soul years ago, but I can help, I can help if the price is right and then you wink at 'em, I dunno where I'm going with that. Anyways.

Brian: In any case, simply prescribe instead of pitch. From what I'm seeing, this is how I would help you. Here's the big thing. Number one, here's the big thing. Number two, Here's the big thing. Number three, big things in this case are just like, what are the big steps that have to be taken in order to fix the problem?

Brian: please God, don't make this like, well, first we need to have a onboarding call, and then we need to. Create a pitch deck, and then we need to, this is not like the onboarding process. This is not the questionnaire they fill out. This is like the big outcomes, like the things they have to be done.

Brian: Well, first thing we need to do is we need to do a customer research for you, because it seems like all the copying, your website is not resonating with your people. Now, whether or not you do copywriting or any sort of custom research for your people, if you're a web designer, for example. That's neither here nor there.

Brian: I would suggest it. We have podcast episodes in the past where I talked through, you need to sell the solution, not just the service. the difference between an offer and just a service. But the three big things are what you want to [00:18:00] talk through here. What are the three big steps?

Brian: Usually three is the best way to do this. Four. Five gets really like annoying. Four is okay. And then once you talk through the three big steps, sell the vacation. And by the end of all this, the gang colitis will have receded. It will be in remission. Your pancreas will start to regenerate through these prescriptions that we're giving you, you will start to have more energy.

Brian: You'll have more of a sex. I dunno what the pancreas does. Whatever it does, it'll all be better. And so you can play with your kids again. You make love to your wife again.

Brian: You can look to the people around you and know they're not judging you for your lack of a pancreas. Again, I have no idea what a pancreas does, but that's selling the vacation. And Hormoz the most quoted man on this damn podcast. It's fine. I've, paid that man a lot of money, so I'm a fan.

Brian: He's made more money than I've paid him. when he talks about selling the vacation, he talks about this, he says. You're not selling the flight to Maui where you go through the security line. You have to take your shoes off. Although that's changed now, thank God. You have to take your laptop outta the bag.

Brian: You have to take your toiletries and put 'em in a separate thing. Then you have to get patted down because the alarm went off [00:19:00] because of your hip replacement. And then you get seated in the middle seat because you flew last minute flight and only middle seats were available. And then it's, you know, 16 hours Hawaii.

Brian: And then you land there and you're jet lagged and you're tired and you're pissed off 'cause your kids are screaming or whatever. That's the trip, right? The vacation is, oh, you're gonna love Maui. So here's how we're gonna do Maui. we're gonna get all your flight stuff taken care of.

Brian: We're gonna get all of your, logistics taken care of. We're gonna do your bags taken care of. All that stuff's handled. But here's the vision for you. Once we get out there, you're going to have a sunset dinner waiting for you. You're going to have surf lessons in the morning.

Brian: You're gonna have a massage the next day. Then we're gonna have a Jeep take you up to the top of a volcano where you can just throw rocks into it just to see the splash of the water. I don't know, that just sounds sexier than the selling of the trip.

Brian: But many freelancers when they get to this part, if they're even brave enough to do this part on a call, you just start getting on the like nitty gritty, logistical detail bullshit of essentially the version of the TSA for your services.

Brian: that's the prescription. That's a very important part. And again, prescribe instead of pitching, they're basically the same thing, But we need to kind of blend the two because the prescription's gonna be very [00:20:00] technical. A pitching's just gonna be like, sell stuff. A pitch description, that's the word. Pitch description is the best of both worlds. You talk about, here's the solution to your problems, and I'm gonna sell you the vacation at the end of it.

Brian: Alright, now we're getting to the most important part of this. All this stuff is the foreplay to what we're actually trying to do to seal the deal. This is the part that most freelancers absolutely mess up. You gotta make the ask

Brian: and it's is not hard to do, but you have to make the ask.

Brian: So you've sold 'em on the vacation their eyes are lit up, they see all the possibilities of what you're offering them, and you just say, does that sound like a fit so far? And they make that stupid smile I just made

Brian: And then follow up with what questions do you have about that? And then from there, just answer whatever questions they might have. They may wanna dig into certain things. That's why it's good to simplify to three points, because in this part of the conversation, the more.

Brian: Nitty gritty details you offer them, the more potential threads it can pull out to just unravel the whole thing. Things that don't really matter. Uh, what preempt do you use for vocals? I don't know. We're asking this question. It's a really stupid question. Little vocalist,

Brian: but the broader and bigger picture we keep, those three [00:21:00] big things I talk through in the pitch description, the broader, we keep those. The more we can start to answer questions about what they care about versus overwhelming 'em with details.

Brian: So when you give 'em the chance, what questions do you have about that? They'll ask the questions that pop into their head. As you talk through those three big things, they'll ask the details about the things that they care about, and you can answer those questions. But at the end of all that, the question you're really waiting for is how much is this gonna be?

Brian: What's the cost of this? Because most freelancers, if you're smart, you don't just have your prices sitting online for everyone to see. You need to have a conversation about it. You don't wanna have what's called sticker shock. If you are a premium freelancer, you should have premium prices. But the problem with premium prices is they have no context attached to them.

Brian: So when you throw them on your website, these branding packages start at $10,000. What? A $10,000 for branding. But they don't realize that. Like you donate a liver to them or something? I, you know, I'm still on the, uh, the doctor analogies right now.

Brian: They don't understand all that goes into it. That's why we hide, quote, hide the price behind the conversation is because we want them to understand all the context of what we're doing and sometimes we can't give a price up front because we just don't know enough information about it. So either way, we're waiting for the price question they're [00:22:00] asking questions.

Brian: We're waiting for, again, the price question. 'and if for some reason they don't ask you the price question. they don't have any more questions for you. You just simply say, so where do you want to go from here?

Brian: And you'll get one of two directions. One is the ready to move forward, in which case you ask for a deposit on the spot. Cool. So what do you wanna go from here? Yeah, let's do this. Cool. here's how we do things.

Brian: We do a 40% non-refundable deposit. It's due now. And once that's paid, I can lock in the dates on my calendar and no one else can take those dates. Those are your dates, Mr. And Mrs. Client. And then when we start, we take the remaining 60% or whatever your terms are. You can do your terms a billion different ways, but you're trying to collect money on the call they either pay or.

Brian: We get to the second direction it could go. And that is you move to the objection, overcome phase of the sales conversation. And objections can be any number of things. It can be simple as cool, a hundred percent down. I don't have the funds for that right now, but is there a way I can lock in the dates?

Brian: You know, it's something simple like that, that's a pseudo objection. Like any reason to not buy or pay you, right? There is an objection

Brian: you can say. Cool, no problem whatsoever. How long do you think it'll take you to get the funds together? And they'll say, well, I've gotta wait for a bank transfer until [00:23:00] next Friday, or should be ready by next Friday.

Brian: Cool, no problem at all. What I can do is I can offer a hundred dollars refundable deposit, and what that does is it soft locks those dates, so I won't sell them to anyone else for any other conversations I have between now and next Friday. And that way if you decide to move forward by next Friday, no one's taking up your dates.

Brian: I'll apply that a hundred dollars towards the 40% deposit if you decide to back out for some reason, I'll refund it. Or if you need more time, we can just talk about it. If you need more time at the end of that, for some reason there's delay somewhere.

Brian: Sound good? Cool. What credit card do you want to use? Again, what we're trying to do here is get them to actually consider putting money down on the spot on the call.

Brian: The reason for that is you'll not get the real objection until they're actually forced to make a decision. And this is the sad reality of the cat mouse game of sales a perfect world,

Brian: you could just take whatever someone says as fact. What they tell you is a hundred percent true. They're not lying to themselves. They're not lying to you. It's all a hundred percent true. And so when someone says, cool. No problem. I just need to think about it for a few days, or, cool, I just need to talk to my business partner, Or whatever other kind of objection they throw up at you, you can just take that as safe value and say, awesome, no problem whatsoever. We can chat on Friday then. But the problem is [00:24:00] sometimes people lie to themselves. sometimes people are throwing up what we call a smoke screen. They're lying to you because they just don't wanna say that like.

Brian: What the real objection is, it could be that you are twice the price of your competitor who offers the same exact service for half the price. at the same quality or better even, why would they hire you? But they don't wanna tell you that to your face 'cause that's rude. But if you never know that that's the case, then you can never actually improve your process or your pricing or figure out how are they delivering in half the price.

Brian: Maybe it's only a matter of time before they ran outta money and they're just gonna be gone. And that problem solved itself. But it could also be that they found a way to deliver it in half the time because they have efficiencies in place. They have a team or they have overseas help, or they have automation or ai, and so they're over there stealing all your clients because you just don't know that that's the real reason.

Brian: You're not getting the client.

Brian: It all comes to getting to the real reason they're not paying you. That's why we go through all this process on a good, proper sales process, is to learn the truth. And you can be kind about it. You can be realistic about it. You can even level with people. Sometimes the process is different for every single sales conversation.

Brian: And some people are natural at this. Some people really struggle with this. Some people will literally never do this no matter how much money [00:25:00] it could make you. That's up to you, but I'm just here to tell you this is a better process than sending proposals. Now let's talk about the third part of this anti proposal sales process, and that is learning how to tackle objections.

Brian: This is where 95% of freelancers really squirm, but if you look at like how real businesses handle sales overcoming objections or what they call objection overcomes. It's what, like a hundred million dollars sales teams drill. They literally have daily drills on this stuff. They rep it out like professional team practicing.

Brian: You have reps, you have drills, you have role plays, you have call reviews. All looking at this one part is the overcome the objection overcomes. You don't have to be that hardcore about it 'cause that's not your career and you're not a hundred million dollar business, but you need to get the 80 20 of this.

Brian: What's the 20% that gets 80% of the results and that is being prepared for the three most common objections you're ever gonna see. With this in mind, remembering the goal here is to find the true objection and filter out the smoke screens. Smoke screens are what people throw up when they just wanna get off of a call, be polite.

Brian: They don't wanna potentially insult you, and you've gotta be like, dude, no problem. Like, if you found someone cheaper, that's no big deal. [00:26:00] Or,or if you just don't wanna work with me, no problem. Like you can,tell me to just hack off. But the goal is to get the smoke screen outta the way and get to the real objection. There's three objections you're going to come across, the most. The first one is the delay, the second one is money. The third one is authority. Probably not in this order, but that's the order that I outlined this. The first one is delay and if you just have some conversations pre-prepared in your mind or written down of how to handle these or a good process in your mind, this will be very helpful.

Brian: And this comes in various forms. One could be, Hey, could you send me the proposal in an email? We're just sending an email summarizing all this easy overcome of those. Sure, no problem. Or sure. what did you have in mind? Like what, what did you need to see actually? Because if you don't offer proposals, you can say, well, I don't actually send proposals, but I'd love to know what you're looking for in that email.

Brian: And you might find out, oh, procurement requires proposals in order to even consider this freelancer. if that's the case, by all means, send a proposal. My God. You don't wanna lose the sale because you didn't send the proposal, in which case legitimate. That's not a smoke screen. It's a legitimate thing.

Brian: Send the proposal and then follow up.

Brian: It also might be a smoke screen because they just need to think about it, or they might just tell you, I just need to think [00:27:00] about it. In which case you say, cool, no problem. How much time do you need in a week, a month, a year, 10 years rest of your life? They'll say, uh, you know, I need till next Monday. Cool.

Brian: do you need to think about just outta curiosity and talk 'em through it. You're trying to figure out what is on their mind. Is itdo they not trust you because you don't have enough case studies or they don't see how you are, what you're saying you can do is actually been done and they're not looked at your portfolio enough?

Brian: Are they considering other people out there? Is there like another freelancer that they're Pitting you against, again, the think about it objection can be, usually it's just a smoke screen to something else

Brian: or another way of say this, I need to look into some things. Something like that. Again, we're trying to figure out what the real objection, what do you need to look into? How much time do you need?

Brian: The next one to talk about is money Objection. You'll get things from like, they just can't afford it. That can be a real thing sometimes. Especially in the B2B world. If the B2B world is like, Hey, the budget's not there, cool. totally understand. Outta curiosity, what is the budget for this?

Brian: What did you expect the pricing to be? Something like that. Same with, it's too expensive, and what we're trying to figure out here is, is it truly too expensive? Do they get a, lower quote from someone else? If so, investigate it to figure out, again, are they offering it lower because they're more efficient than you and they're getting even more [00:28:00] profit for less time spent?

Brian: Another money objection could be something about like, Hey, I just need to get the money together. Cool. How much time do you need? Months. Okay, so it sounds like we're trying to save for this. What is the plan if it's a band I'm talking to in the music production space? Because that's my background. I might talk them through like, what's your savings plan?

Brian: Like, what are you be able to, to save up right now? How many members do you have? How many people are contributing to this? Have you considered Kickstarter? Those sorts of things. I have somebody connected with, if you're trying to do Kickstarter, they can actually probably fund the whole album. If you have, the size of following that you have, we can solve this.

Brian: Money is not always gonna be an objection for you. You can find ways around it. Sometimes it can be things like Klarna, in some cases probably not the best case. In most cases. It can be things like, Kickstarters. It can be things like.

Brian: Finding out that you have competitors offering the same value for cheaper, in which case you've gotta make yourself more efficient.

Brian: But the final one we wanna talk through is authority. And this is something that you need to kind of suss out ahead of time if you can, instead of waiting for the objection at the end of the call. And that is where somebody needs to talk to the business partner. They need to talk to, band mates, if your music producer talking to bands, they need to talk to their spouse.

Brian: In some cases. In these cases, it's better to bring this up [00:29:00] in the discovery. So simple way is like, Hey, so tell me about your business. Cool. Do you have a business partner or is it just yours or what? Or who's the decision maker for this project? Because that way you know that there's going to be a second call.

Brian: You can likely maybe try to get the person on the second call before you even get to the diagnosis or the prescription. I mean,

Brian: but those are the three kind of objections you're gonna hit. The delay objection, the money objection, and the authority. Now there's tons of content online. I am by no means the expert in objection overcomes,

Brian: but I have more experience for objection overcomes then. Probably 99% of people listen to this podcast,

Brian: and that leads us to our fourth step. This is the fourth and final step. I've got a bonus. This is gonna be probably the most valuable part of this, episode, but so far we have.

Brian: Talk through pre-qualifying clients. You don't even get on the call with people that earn a good fit. You learn how to run a good collaborative sales discovery call process where you are asking good questions, digging into things, being able to find the diagnosis before you get to the pitch description.

Brian: And then number three is you're learning to tackle the objections, all important. Number four is what they call BAM fam. B-A-M-F-A-M. Book a meeting [00:30:00] from a meeting. Always have a next step. Preferably a call. So if you don't end the call with money collected, or even if you do, you wanna still have a next step, but if you, especially didn't collect money on the call, you wanna have a next step, some sort of call to be had after the fact.

Brian: And the easiest way to pitch this is cool. So you need till Friday to think about this, or you need to collect quotes from people, or whatever it is. So let's just, let's just go ahead and do this. Let's go ahead and put this on the books. It's just so, it's on both of our schedules. And we don't have to like scramble last minute.

Brian: If,you decide to move forward, we can put it for next Tuesday. Does that work for you? Cool. 3:00 PM Awesome. So what we can do with this is if you have questions that come up between now and Tuesday, we can chat about 'em. I can answer your questions. If you've decided to move forward with someone else, we can just cancel the call.

Brian: No problem. you decide you wanna move forward without the call, we can also do that. But that way we at least have a call on the calendar. Sound good? Cool. Almost everyone who's even remotely serious will do that. Some people that aren't serious will still do it. But you at least have the next step on paper

Brian: And that's a very simple fourth step bamfam book, a meeting from a meeting. And that's where we get to the bonus here. This is for everybody, but especially for those of you with complex offers,

Brian: offers are damn easy to sell without a proposal. It's [00:31:00] like. It's productized, it's literally the same thing you're selling. Every client would then be a couple tweaks of variations. So it's really easy to say, cool, I've, uncovered all the problems you have. I do know that my productized service will solve that.

Brian: here's how it works. Are you, enter you out. Right. We don't have to send a proposal for that, but for complex, really, intense things that you're selling, and this can be very common inin certain web spaces, definitely in certain design spaces, definitely in some video spaces.

Brian: Where a lot of moving parts, a lot of things to figure out. Proposals are very common in these areas,

Brian: but a thing to consider is that the proposal is the plan for what you're going to do with the client. It takes a lot of time to put together if it's done right, especially for a complex service, and that plan is very valuable. So instead of giving them the plan for free, instead you can sell it as a paid strategy phase.

Brian: You can make it fully refundable

Brian: and you can even tie guarantees to this one deliverable. Lemme kinda give you some examples you understand this. So if you're a music producer, you might sell it as a pre-production plan. So it includes creative direction call with the entire band.

Brian: It includes like a genre or artist reference breakdown. Of all the [00:32:00] different kind of artists or genre things that they're gonna do with the music. A song structure plan, a project brief for session musicians, if you have session musicians, et cetera, et cetera. Put it all together, like essentially what'sthe master grand plan for this project, especially if it's like a big album.

Brian: and the way you can do this is, hey, it's 500 bucks and it's fully refundable. Or better yet, what I prefer. Hey, it's 500 bucks and it's fully refundable, and if you decide to move forward with me after the plan's created, I will put that $500 towards the project. That's one way to sell it.

Brian: you can say if you're not happy with the plan, you can essentially just refund it. no strings attached. Or if you love the plan and don't like me, you can just take the plan and,and do it with another producer. Or better yet, here's how I prefer to do this. You could charge 2000 a song and then you can say it's 2000 a song.

Brian: the way it works is I first create a full pre-production plan for you. And we'll talk over the plan. We'll have this entire plan, this entire document, and ifyour entire band isn't a hundred percent excited to do this project with me, I will refund the entire project to you. The full [00:33:00] $2,000, the full $10,000, the full whatever it is that they paid upfront the full 40% deposit, whatever they paid so far, some larger chunk of money the $500 that I just proposed for the just the thing itself.

Brian: And what you're doing is you're saying. Just to give some numbers here, it's a $10,000 project. It's five songs, 2000 song takes a 40% deposit to get started. So $4,000 down. And you're saying Mr. Clients, and Mrs. Clients, Hey band bros.

Brian: If you don't love this plan that I've created for you, if you don't love this entire document for pre-production that we've mapped out and the whole plan moving forward with all the session musicians or whatever, then we will just refund the $4,000 you're out. Nothing. But that way you at least see the vision that I have for your band before we commit to this together.

Brian: And if other producers won't do this for you, you should probably run, because I stand by my work. That's how I prefer that most people do this. Let's go to design the design world. You can do like a brand strategy intensive, maybe includes like a nine minute call, competitive audit, mood boards brand positioning documents.

Brian: add whatever you want to the list. Anything you would essentially do is step one for a project and you can make it a refundable 750 bucks or again, just sell them [00:34:00] on the full package. like I talked about before, where, hey, it's a $10,000 project. Maybe it's a $4,000 deposit.

Brian: And you'll say, cool. The way I do this is if you're not happy with a brand strategy intensive portion of this, where we have all this laid out in the entire plane moving forward for your brand, I will refund the $4,000 or thefull whatever.

Brian: And one more example, this is actually an example from a,podcast guest we had on this is, Kinda what Ryan Coral did, episode 284. and the title for this episode is called Stuck with Low Dollar Projects. Here's How to Level Up to $50,000 Projects with Ryan Coral.

Brian: Again, that's episode 2 84. so this is all from memory, so I might have gotten some of the small details wrong here.

Brian: But he offers like kinda like this one day creative direction workshop. I think he sells it for like 1500, $2,000, something like that.It includes, I believe something like scripting, shot list, mood board, production schedule, et cetera. And what he does is he sells that first, it's a one or two day kind of intensive for one or $2,000.

Brian: And then he says, if you're not happy with this plan, I will refund the 2000 bucks. And if you're happy with the plan. You can go take the state, literally any other videographer out there, they'll do the project for you. Or if [00:35:00] you like me and you like the plan, then we can put it forward to the actual project.

Brian: And he's getting 50,000, 80,000 a hundred,probably a hundred thousand dollars projects from the strategy.

Brian: this works really well for two reasons.The first is. It is a risk reversal. If anybody's about to spend five, 10, $20,000 on a project and there's an easy out for them and they can say, Hey, I'm selling you this whole vision.

Brian: I'm gonna give you this whole vision, and if you don't approve it, I give you a full refund. Most other producers or most other videographers won't do this. They won't offer this. Most of them, you'll get in bed with them and you'll pay all this money you'll realize the vision was wrong from the start and there's no really backing out.

Brian: So I prefer to do it this way, Mr. And Mrs. Client, because I don't wanna work with a client that feels stuck in this. So when we,create this plan for you, and we work together collaboratively, to figure out what we're gonna do on this project, now I know you're bought in. I know you like the vision, and I know I can move forward with confidence.

Brian: So that's the first reason is it's risk reduction, risk reversal. They have an out, they have an easy out.

Brian: The second reason this works so well, especially [00:36:00] if you're selling it like for a lower dollar thing, like Ryan does, you know, sell a $2,000 two day or one day workshop and then upsell that to a 50,000 project if you do it that way. This creates what we call a micro commitment. Someone's spending even a hundred bucks ahead of time.

Brian: Is a small micro commitment. That's why we take deposits on calls. That's why we try to get people on the call is microcom commitments. Get people to commit to something. And they did a whole study where it was like in the political season, they asked people to put this giant, massive political board in their yard for, you know, some candidate.

Brian: And it's the candidate that they're gonna vote for, that they did vote for, but they're just like, no, I don't want that giant thing in my yard. And so like some tiny percentage, let's just say 2% of people that they asked actually did it. But then they went back and they, again, they did the study in another sample size or maybe the same neighborhood years later, and they asked for people to put a tiny little sign in the window, and they had like a high percentage, let say 40% of people said, sure, I'll put the tiny sign in the window.

Brian: And then they went back to 'em and said, Hey, would you put this big sign in your yard and say half of the people that put the small sign decided to do the big sign? So net net, it's like 20% of the group said yes, as opposed to like one or [00:37:00] 2%. So a significant rise. Why? Because of micro-commitments. We said yes to the small things, so we'll likely say yes to the bigger thing.

Brian: Those two things alone are more than worth the like 45, 50 minutes you just spent listening to me ramble If you implement them, that's the big thing. If you actually implement them. But I hope and plead and beg that you'll stop sending proposals and if this episode did anything whatsoever to get you off the proposal losers game. I count my job as as one here

Brian: now, if you wanna do this alone, by all means, go for it. Please, God, do it. Anything's better than nothing, but if you want our help with it, we have coached hundreds of freelancers doing stuff like this and more not just the sales side, not just the anti proposal side, but also on the marketing side and getting strangers to hire you.

Brian: So if you're the type of person where you have just like a couple inquiries a month and you're like, well. I already closed 80%, so I don't need to worry about not sending proposals. If that's you, you need our help. If you're sending proposals and you're closing 20% of people, you need our help, or you least need to change your process.

Brian: and we're here to help as well. And we do the exact same thing that I just pitched. You should do yourself. The way we work [00:38:00] is we tie everything to our client acquisition. Roadmap. we call it the continuous clients marketing roadmap. We literally craft a customized roadmap for you on the strategy and all the things you need to do in order to reach your income goals.

Brian: And we pitch it to you and you either say, yes, I'm in, let's go, and we move forward. Or you say, no, I'm out. I hate you, and we refund every dollar to you. the reason we do that is the same reason you should do that is because you can see everything we're gonna do with you.

Brian: You can see all the stuff that we're gonna work on together, and you can say, yes, I'm down to do all these things, and we can move forward harmoniously. Or you can say, I don't wanna do all these things. Are there other things I can do? And we can say, there are other things we can do. Or we'll say, no, there's nothing else you can do.

Brian: This is all you got. Are you in or you out? And you can make the decision. Are you in or you out? But at least we're not gonna work with those people who are not in. So if you want to learn more about this, just go to six figure creative.com/coaching.

Brian: There's a short video on that page that kinda goes you over the details of how it works. But that is all I got for you today.

Brian: enjoy your fantasy football season. Hopefully you're become a champion like me, a three-time champion like me with my wonderful Geiger Trophy [00:39:00] behind.

Brian: And I'll see you next week on the Six Figure Creative Podcast. Peace,