In this episode, Chris gives Melinda advice on how to explain strategy to potential clients and how to close the lead without using visuals to explain what you do. You can demonstrate the value of thinking by talking and listening.
Melinda Livsey
Marks and Maker
— [Transcription] —
@0:36
[Chris Do]: So now, we’re going to set some new benchmarks, and I’m going to give her some new tools. Sharpen those “P-shing!” Alright. Let’s do it! Let’s get into it. Alright. Fire away.
[Melinda Livsey]: You had mentioned in the last episode that I could have that whole conversation without visuals and I would like to hear how.
@0:55
[C]: Okay. So here’s the cool part: once you get into the thinking stage where you can charge for it, well thinking doesn’t have to have the traditional forms that making does. So making requires mock-ups, beautiful photography, great presentations. But thinking, you can demonstrate the value of thinking just by talking and listening. That you can do. So, we’re gonna do this where I’m gonna show you how to have this whole conversation without any visuals and feel fully confident without a website, without anything, you can do this. All you have to do is tell better stories. And, make analogies. Find metaphors. So this is where I may or may not have told you to do this already, but you kinda have to read some case studies so that you’re ready to talk about a lot of different things. Wherever the conversation goes, so this is where Bruce Lee says, “Be like water.” You wanna be like water. So I’m just controlling and directing energy so that when they push, I pull, and when they pull, I push, and so I’m always there when I’m not there–that kind of thing. This is getting into the whole zen of it. The first call typically is like, “Are they even qualified to be talking to me?” And that’s the right attitude to have. Are they qualified in the sense of, “Can they afford me? Do I align with their goals? Am I vibing with them? Is what they want realistic?” Because you can do it all, but if you need it done in two days, I’m not the right person for you. And that’s totally okay. And we’re doing it without judgement. Okay? So this is kind of like, we’re going to enter into this stage where, give me this set-up, and you and I will play. How can we do this so that you feel like this is close to your experience.
@2:41
[M]: Well, being that this conversation is not close to my experience, it would be just someone calling me–are we talking about, is this the qualifying call? What call is this?
[C]: Any call you want. Any call where you’re going to have to explain to them what you do without visuals. Almost all of the business that I do is without visuals.
[M]: Okay.
[C]: Alright.
[M]: Um, let’s just say it is someone who wants…it’s a start-up (because I do have a lot of start-ups contacting me) that wants to come out with an app.
[C]: Okay. Anything else?
@3:15
[M]: And, they want a website, and they want branding. And let’s just say they have the framework of their app done by a developer. So now they realize, “Oh! It doesn’t look good.”
[C]: Right. They’ve done the UX part, but they haven’t done the UI part. Okay. Alright, so, do we begin the conversation at the beginning? Is this our second call–you let me know.
[M]: Uhhh, I would, in my–in the way I do it, it would be the second call after I have qualified them with, let’s say, the timeline and price, and goals. Like, the overarching goal. Do we vibe? So this would be the one, let’s say the “sales” one, like, to close the lead.
[C]: Oh. That’s very interesting. Usually I do all the closing at the first call.
[M]: Okay, then let’s make it that call!
[C]: Can we do it?
[M]: Yeah! ‘Cause I’m learning here.
[C]: So, this’ll be call “one and a half.”
@4:05
[C]: Basically you’re gonna take the second call and you’re going to smash it into their first call. So what we’re looking for are kinds of micro-engagements, like microtransactions to gain trust and to build trust. So when we’re talking to them, I’m very deliberate and intentional in terms of the words that I choose and how I describe what it is that we do. Because that’s your best opportunity to establish who you are and what you’re gonna do for your client. So go ahead: Set it up! We’re gonna talk. The phone rings. You call me or I call you? You call me.
[M]: I call you because…
[C]: Right. That’s how it works. Right.
[M]: You’re gonna teach me this, right? [Laughter.]
[C]: Right.
@4:44
[M]: Hey, Chris. I saw your work. I have an app and I already have the framework done and I got the UX done, but I need a website. It looks horrible, so I need branding, and…I’d love to work with you.
[C]: Great! Fantastic! First of all, thank you for calling. Before I dive into all the deliverables and things of that nature, I’m curious what you saw or why you decided to reach out to me in the first place.
[M]: Um, I reached out to you because our mutual friend referred me to you.
[C]: Oh. Kelly?
[M]: Yeah! Kelly.
[C]: Love Kelly! I’m gonna have to send her a little thank you note.
[M]: Alright, that’s great! Yeah!
[C]: Okay. Mutual friend.
[M]: She told me that I should talk to you because I was telling her about where we’re at and that I was looking for someone, and then your name came up.
@5:25
[C]: Okay. Perfect. So I just want to let you know (And we’re having this just as a verbal conversation, alright? So I’m not even gonna look at Melinda. It’s just, it’s a telephone conversation.) I just wanna let you know that a lot of clients come to me and ask me to do things and I’m thrilled to do them. The thing is, I’m successful at doing these things because I have a framework that I use and if you’re open to this, [then] I would like to describe it a little bit to you, to see if it’s something that you would like to have done as well.
[M]: Sure.
[C]: Okay. Great.
@5:53
[C]: So essentially what we do is we do discovery, and in the discovery we try to learn about not so much you and your company brand, but more importantly, who your customers and users are. We want to understand their pain points, their challenges…um, the jobs that they’re trying to do. What a win looks like, what a fail costs them, we want to understand not just the demographics, but the psychographics. This is what we can learn. When we figure out what they want, and we give the users what they want. We typically help our clients grow and succeed. Whether that’s an adoption of an app, or the usability of a website, and that’s really what’s driving all the aesthetic decisions that we make. Now for that, we typically charge anywhere between five to ten thousand dollars to do the strategy work itself. I say this upfront because it may not be a good fit for you. And that is exclusive of any deliverables. And then through the discovery phase, we learn about what you’re trying to accomplish, how you want to do it, whether or not you need a social media marketing campaign, all these other kind of things, and then we kind of budget together with you, and you can hire whoever you want. I get paid mostly to do the thinking part, and then whether or not you want to hire our firm to do the rest of the deliverables, it’s entirely up to you. How does that sound?
@7:12
[M]: That sounds good. Do you have any idea of what the rest of the deliverables might cost?
@7:20
[C]: Yes, I have a range, and, please don’t quote me on this, but if we’re talking about a website, to design and develop a website for you, based on the little that I know about you already, it’s going to be between 20 to 30 thousand dollars, including development. It will be a WordPress site, where you will be able to manage the content itself. It will be a custom theme that we build for you. Um, in terms of the identity, we can design the logo for 10K, and to design 3 pieces of collateral, usually a business card, an email signature, some–whatever else you think you need, that’s probably an additional 10,000 dollars, but I want to warn you, usually the website is the one that has the most range because of features and functions that you want to add to it.
@8:06
[M]: Okay. Well, I’m interested in moving forward. What would be the next steps?
@8:10
[C]: Okay. So, what I can do is I can send you a deck that will outline our process so that you have something more concrete (I don’t know if this is something that you need to share with your team. I want to make sure that everyone feels good about doing this, because once we get into the discover phase, we’ll need to align all of the stakeholders.). So I’ll send you a deck and if that feels good, it will have an outline of a budget and timeline. That would be the next step. And then we can arrange a call to go over the proposal that I send you.
[M]: Okay. Sounds good.
[C]: Is that cool?
[M]: Yeah.
[C]: Okay. You’re like being too easy on me.
[M]: No, I’m not. I’m learning. Because I’m taking…
[C]: You’re taking notes?
@8:53
[M]: Yeah, I’m taking notes because I want to say that we’re essentially not doing exactly the same thing, but you’re right how you took the two meetings and you’re putting them into one. When I said “case studies,” I did mean “process.” As in, I’m showing (what I’m saying is a “case study”) is it’s the strategy roadmap that I walk them through, so I’m essentially doing everything that you’re doing, minus the proposal, because at that second meeting, they say, “Yes, let’s move forward.” Then we move straight to [the] contract and invoice. So, we’re kinda doing a similar thing except you’re condensing it even shorter, except then, there is work in the backend to do. But you use a template, I know.
@9:33
[C]: We use a template and you usually shuffle around a few projects to make sure they feel like, “Yeah. These are in alignment with what I want to do.”
[M]: Right.
@9:41
[C]: Now most of the time, it never goes that smoothly where I just say that and they’re like, “Great! Here’s all the money in the world!” There’s usually a little push-back here and there, and we didn’t get to explore that. But I just want to move the conversation tighter, so the next time it’s proposals, we’ll review it, and then after that it’s contracts. Right?
[M]: Yeah.
[C]: And that’s it.
[M]: Yeah, I still don’t see the–
[C]: There are no visuals.
[M]: The big advantage of…What’s the biggest advantage of moving from what I’m doing currently to what you’re saying?
@10:14
[C]: Well, to be honest, if you had said that everything sounds great, I’d just send you no proposal–I mean, no work, I would just send you the budget and timeline, because you already bought in.
[M]: But that doesn’t usually happen, right?
@10:24
[C]: It never happens. I’m sorry. Let me restate: It almost never happens. It has happened to use before. Where I’m literally driving in from home to work, and I’m closing a hundred-thousand dollar job in my car because I wasn’t even thinking it was a real job: “And yes, this sounds great. We’ll start the schedule Fri–I’ll coordinate with the executive team to come out to Los Angeles to come and work with you.” And I said, “Okay, great. I’ll send you a budget.” So I went in, talked to my executive producer at that time, and I said, “Hey! We need to send an invoice for an estimate, and I want nothing else except for the price.” You describe it exactly the way I say it and you put a price because, at this point, what you don’t want to do is go past the sale. Once the client says, “I agree. A hundred thousand bucks. Let’s do it.” I don’t send anything else because they might see something that confuses them.
[M]: Right.
[C]: So we would be able to skip that step. So in this roleplay, I volunteered to send you a deck that I shouldn’t have, so that was my bad. Because you didn’t even ask for it.
[M]: Right. I would normally ask for it. Yeah.
[C]: Yeah, you would normally ask for it. Yeah. I was prepared for you to ask for it, so, it was kinda in the typical scenario to…
[M]: My brain was full, so I was…
[C]: That’s okay. So that’s why I’m like, “Yeah, boom. There it is.”
[M]: Right. So I’m doing the…essentially when you’re showing them something visually, and you’re saying it to them, and possibly having a follow-up call, I’m condensing that into a meeting whereby the end of it they’re saying, “Yes. Let’s go.” And then I skip the sending of the proposal and go straight to the contract.
[C]: Alright. We might be nerding out a little bit too much here for people to understand exactly what the heck we’re doing. The point is, you should be–honestly, I could stand in a room with you, all day long, with no visuals, and still close the deal.
[M]: But you’re still having to send the proposal, with the work.
@12:05
[C]: Well, if necessary, I would send no proposal. If you want me to roleplay that, I could do that, but I’m just saying: All these things are, uh, in a way, crutches. Really, your mind is what they’re paying for, so you should be able to describe what you do and how you do it. Without any visual, without any deck. The deck is just to back-up what you said.