The Curse of the Creative Monkey
Too many creatives are trapped. They are brilliant at their craft, yet they feel like a tool, a “creative monkey” executing orders from clients who hover over their shoulder questioning every decision. This isn’t a partnership. It’s a transaction. And in a transaction, the primary drivers are always speed and cost.
It’s a frustrating position to be in, especially for seasoned professionals with a decade or more of experience. Award-winning designers and internationally recognized photographers find themselves stuck, unable to command the budgets or creative freedom they deserve. They are reactive, not proactive. They are seen as a “gun for hire,” not a creative problem solver.
As creative business coach Matt Essam explains in a conversation with The Futur’s Chris Do, this dynamic is not just about money. “For me it’s really about this concept of going from this kind of worker where the client's constantly over your shoulder… to more like this partner where the client kind of sees you as the expert,” Essam says.
The money is a byproduct of this shift in positioning. It’s what happens when you stop being an order-taker and start being a strategic guide. When one of Essam’s clients, an animator named Alessandro, applied these principles, he took a project from a stated 12k budget and stretched it to 25k. Another client, Will, went from designing £500 logos to landing £10k branding projects. A third, Daniel, saw his average project value increase by 200% in a single year.
This is not about working harder or learning a new technical skill. It is about a fundamental shift in how you communicate, how you diagnose problems, and how you position your value. It’s about learning to sell without being salesy.
To make this transition, Essam outlines three critical ideas that can transform your client relationships and your business: sell the outcome, identify the gap, and become the guide.
The First Shift: Sell The Outcome, Not The Service
Most creatives sell the wrong thing. They show up talking about logos, animations, or social media management. They are selling the workout, not the six-pack abs. They are selling the uncomfortable plane ride, not the sunny beach at the destination.
“Too much and too often I see creatives going out there and talking about, ‘Hey, who wants a logo? Who needs some animation?’” Essam notes. When you sell a service, you are only speaking to the small fraction of the market that has already decided what solution they need. These clients are typically comparing you on three factors: quality, speed, and price. This is the race to the bottom, a competition you do not want to win.
To escape this trap, you must sell the outcome. This means shifting the conversation away from the deliverable and toward the result the client truly desires. As Do points out, the analogy is clear: “Six-pack abs versus 60-minute workouts.” It seems obvious, but creatives consistently fall into the trap of geeking out on their process, forgetting that the client just wants to get to their destination safely and comfortably.
They create Instagram accounts detailing their logo design process, getting thousands of likes from fellow designers but zero clients. “The content isn't for your clients,” Essam states. “The content is for fellow designers.”
The key is to dig for the goal behind the goal. When a client says they need a new logo, a transformative creative doesn’t just ask, “What color?” They ask, “Why?” They slow the client down, zoom out, and take control of the conversation to uncover the real business objective.
- Why do you need a new logo?
- What will a new logo do for your business?
- What problem are you trying to solve with this?
This is precisely what Essam’s client Will did to leap from £500 logos to £10k branding projects. He stopped treating the logo as the end goal and started treating it as a tool to achieve a larger business outcome. He forced his clients to see the bigger picture.
When you ask these deeper questions, something powerful happens. The client steps back and realizes you are different. Do frames their reaction: “Whoa, you’re not like the 15 other logo designers I’ve spoken to.” You are no longer just another vendor in a long list of potential hires. You are a strategic thinker.
This approach moves the conversation from the logical (the service) to the emotional (the outcome). Nobody is excited about the logistics of air travel. They are excited about the feeling of sand between their toes. Your job is to sell that feeling, not the engineering of the airplane. This is a core tenet Do often revisits in discussions on value-based pricing, where the focus shifts from your cost to the client's gain.
The Second Shift: Identify and Widen The Gap
Once you are focused on the outcome, the next step is to define the journey. Essam visualizes this as two islands. Island A is where the client is now: frustrated, struggling, and facing challenges. Island B is their desired destination: successful, professional, and achieving their goals. Your service is the bridge between these two islands.
The crucial insight is this: the client's perception of the gap between Island A and Island B will always determine how much they are willing to invest. This investment isn’t just money; it’s also time and energy.
If the client believes the gap is small, they will expect a small price. In London's public transport system, a voice famously warns passengers to “mind the gap,” a small six-inch space between the train and the platform. A client who says, “I just need a logo,” perceives the problem as a tiny gap. They think it takes a few hours, so why should it cost thousands of dollars?
Your job is to show them they are not just stepping over a crack. They are crossing an ocean.
As the expert, you must help the client understand the true scale of their challenge. To do this, you must answer three fundamental questions in every sales conversation:
- Where are they now? Get a clear picture of their current situation, their pains, and their frustrations.
- Where do they want to be? Understand their ultimate goal, the outcome behind the stated need.
- What’s standing in their way? Identify the obstacles, both real and perceived, that are preventing them from reaching their destination.
By asking probing questions, you zoom the client out. They begin to see that their initial request for a simple logo was just a symptom of a much larger problem. Essam explains, “Maybe there's more to this. And yeah, maybe I don't really know what my brand represents. Maybe I don't know who my ideal client is.”
Suddenly, the gap widens. The journey looks longer and more complex. They realize they don’t just need a boat; they need an experienced captain to navigate treacherous waters. This is how you reframe the value of your work. The client's thinking shifts from “How much does a logo cost?” to “How much is it worth to solve this massive business problem?”
This is not about fabricating problems. It is about revealing the true complexity that you, as the expert, already see. Many creatives perform this diagnostic work behind the scenes, doing market research and strategy development without ever showing it to the client. This is a mistake. As Essam's client Will discovered, making that strategic process visible is what justifies the higher fee. He wasn't necessarily doing more work, but he was demonstrating more value by involving the client and showing them the full scope of the journey.
The goal is to move from a small, transactional gap to a large, strategic one. The bigger the problem you can help them see, the more they will value your solution. This is the essence of moving from technician to consultant, a critical step explored in discussions about attracting higher-quality clients.
The Third Shift: Become The Guide, Not The Donkey
Once the client understands the true scale of the journey, they need someone to lead the way. This presents a choice. You can be the donkey, carrying all the bags up the mountain for a low fee. Or you can be the guide, the expert who knows the terrain, avoids the pitfalls, and ensures a safe arrival.
Nobody wants to be the donkey. Donkeys are commodities. Guides are invaluable.
To become the guide, you must do more than just identify the gap. You must dig deeper to uncover problems the client doesn’t even know they have. This is where you truly establish your expertise, moving beyond what the client has told you and into the realm of professional diagnosis.
Essam cites one of his mentors, business coach Taki Moore, who has a powerful saying: *“When you can articulate your clients' problems better than they can, you gain their permission to solve them.”*
This is the ultimate form of positioning. You are no longer reacting to their requests. You are proactively identifying the root causes of their struggles. You are giving them a new perspective, a “lightbulb moment” that changes how they see their own business. The fear many creatives have of “rocking the boat” by asking too many questions is misplaced. The real risk is not asking enough.
Essam says the discomfort of sales often comes from focusing too much on ourselves: what will they think of me? What if I say the wrong thing? The solution is to shift that focus entirely onto the client. Be genuinely curious. Your goal on a sales call should not be to win a client, but to serve them. “My intention is that whether they become a client or not, I will have given them some value on that call,” Essam explains. “I would have asked questions that other people haven't asked and I will get them more clarity.”
When you adopt this mindset of service, sales conversations become enjoyable. You build a reputation as a creative problem solver, and referrals start flowing, even from people who didn’t hire you. You become oversubscribed, with more demand than you have capacity for. And that is the foundation for a truly thriving creative business, a theme often explored in discussions on building a sustainable client base.
The Lightbulb Formula: From Symptom to Solution
How do you reliably create these “lightbulb moments” that position you as the guide? Essam provides a four-step framework: The Lightbulb Moment Formula.
Most people make the mistake of starting with the solution. They lead with their service or their fix, which immediately puts the client on the defensive. The client thinks, “They're probably just saying this is the solution because they want me to buy that.” To avoid this, you must meet the client where they are.
The formula works like this:
- Symptom: Start with what the client is currently experiencing. These are the undesirable pains and frustrations that are top of mind for them.
- Assumption: Identify the false belief or incorrect assumption the client has about why they are experiencing those symptoms.
- Real Problem: Reveal the true, underlying problem that they didn't know existed. This is your diagnosis as the expert.
- Solution: Present your solution, which now directly addresses the real problem you've just uncovered.
Let’s use an example from the world of social media. A client is frustrated with their lack of Instagram growth.
- Symptom: “I’m posting every day, using all the right hashtags, but I’m just not getting the engagement I want.”
- Assumption: They assume, “The algorithm doesn’t like me,” or “Social media just doesn’t work for my business.”
- Real Problem: You, the expert, diagnose the issue. As Do points out, the real problem is they are creating generic content with no voice. “It literally feels like copy-paste… why would I want to read or look at this post? It doesn't help me, it doesn't serve me.” The problem isn't the platform; it's the unoriginality of their content.
- Solution: Now, you can present a solution: a content strategy focused on developing a unique voice and providing genuine value to their target audience.
By following this path, you have completely reframed the situation. The client has a lightbulb moment: “Ah, I’ve been focused on the wrong thing!” Because you revealed a problem they didn’t know existed, their ego is not attached to it. They can accept the new diagnosis without feeling defensive. They now trust you because you’ve demonstrated a deeper understanding of their situation than they had themselves. It’s a powerful way to build authority through your content and conversations.
The Three Types of Problems
To become a master diagnostician, it's helpful to understand that problems exist on different levels of awareness for the client. Essam breaks them down into three categories.
1. The Known, Spoken Problem: This is what the client tells everyone. It's their stated need. “Our website’s not getting enough traffic.” It’s the surface-level issue they are actively trying to solve.
2. The Known, Unspoken Problem: This is a deeper fear or truth that the client knows but doesn't readily admit. They know their website isn’t getting traffic, but deep down, they also know it's because they neglect it, find it confusing to update, and have no idea where to even start.
3. The Unknown, Unspoken Problem: This is the problem that only you, the expert, can see. This is the root cause. A website expert might diagnose that the client’s site is built on an outdated, painful-to-use CMS. The reason they neglect it isn’t laziness; it’s because the system itself is a barrier. This is the core issue that, once solved, addresses all the symptoms above it.
Your job as the guide is to move the conversation from the known, spoken problem down to the unknown, unspoken one. This is where the true transformation occurs. When you can say, “The reason you’re not getting traffic is because your CMS makes it so difficult to post content that you’ve given up, and without fresh content, you’ll never rank,” the client has a profound realization.
That is the point you transition from a person who can build a website to a strategic partner who can solve a fundamental business bottleneck. Daniel, Essam’s client who increased his project value by 200%, built a “brand scorecard” to do just this. It’s a digital asset that helps him identify these unknown problems before the sales call even begins, allowing him to enter the conversation with incredible insight.
The 3-Step Process for Every Sales Conversation
All these concepts come together in a simple, repeatable process that you can use in every sales conversation to shift from worker to partner. Essam calls it the 3-Step Process: Discover, Diagnose, and Propose.
By implementing this framework, you systematize the journey from order-taker to trusted guide, ensuring you are always leading the conversation toward value, not just price.
Step 1: Discover
This is the listening phase. Your sole focus is on understanding the two islands and the gap between them. You must get absolute clarity on where the client is now, where they want to be, and what they believe is standing in the way. Before moving on, summarize your understanding back to the client: “So, from what I understand, this is what’s currently happening... is there anything I’ve missed?” This ensures you are both on the same page and builds immense trust.
Step 2: Diagnose
This is the expert phase. Now that you understand their perceived reality, you listen for their assumptions, false beliefs, and mistaken actions. This is where you apply the Lightbulb Moment Formula. You are looking for the unknown problem. Based on what you've heard, you can introduce a new perspective: “I hear you say that you believe X, but my experience shows the real problem is often Y.” You are challenging their thinking in a supportive way, guiding them toward a deeper understanding. Addressing these underlying beliefs is crucial, as they will become objections later if left untouched. This is the core of effective sales training: preempting objections by reframing the problem.
Step 3: Propose
Only after you have discovered their world and diagnosed the real problem do you present your solution. By this point, the proposal is not a pitch; it's the logical next step. Your solution directly addresses the real problem you have both agreed upon. The value has been established, the gap has been widened, and you have been positioned as the trusted guide. The conversation is no longer about the cost of a deliverable but the value of solving a significant business challenge.
This is not a trick. It is a fundamental reorientation of your role. You stop being a passive recipient of tasks and become an active architect of solutions.
You stop selling what you do. You start selling what your client gets.
TRANSCRIPT
what is up everybody happy thursday so happy to see you i hope you missed us since yesterday but today we have actually a really jam-packed show and you're going to find a lot of value in it i just want to say what's up first to the donation the futurist you know who you
are the doers the donuts today we're going to be talking about selling without being salesy with matt essem here's what i know about matt real quickly he's a creative business coach he's a speaker an author a certified life coach that's pretty cool i think he has a degree in new media he hails
out of leeds england uk and his mission is to help freelancers and agencies find and attract their dream clients matthew matthew matt essem welcome to the show thanks for having me chris yeah okay okay thank you for doing this and you may recognize his voice and the reason why you're going to recognize
his voice is because of this he was on episode 91 which is a really popular episode for us why your story is valuable so this is one of those ones where there's bonus content so if you really love this episode i'm gonna highly recommend you do that we'll provide a link to that
specific podcast in the notes below okay matt i'm excited to talk to you you've done office hours calls with our community and we decided let's have you on the show and i think i looked at your deck it is super awesome it really is i'm really impressed uh just curious how did you
come about putting this deck together um i kind of compressed it actually from one of my longer coaching programs we usually do a full day on this so i just kind of took out the best bits and crammed it into 60 or 90 minutes however long we've got okay we're going to try
to do this as in an interactive as possible matt's got a super slick deck with some slides and diagrams i think it's going to really help you create a people out there learn how to be better at sales and he's got three big ideas so let me get back to my deck here
three big ideas it's gonna make your head explode in a good way so really we're gonna focus on selling the outcome we've talked about this on the show before how to identify the gap and for you not to be the hero but to become the guide so these are the three big ideas
so i'm going to turn the show over to you and get out of your way so take it over thank you yeah so i guess one of the reasons i'm so passionate about teaching this topic is because it's been so impactful for me in my own personal business but also for my clients
so i'm privileged to work with and coach award-winning designers internationally recognized photographers um and i see people who are at their top of their game creatively but they're frustrated because maybe they feel like they're being treated like a bit of a kind of creative monkey or a bit of a tool by their
clients and maybe they're not quite earning as much as they want or charging as much as they know they could and when people have the freedom the creative freedom which is often brought about by you know bigger budgets and actually being able to just do what you want that's when the magic happens
so this isn't just about earning more money that's a nice outcome of it but for me it's really about kind of this concept of going from this kind of worker where the client's constantly over your shoulder can we change this can we do this yeah like you have for me i hate that
everybody hates that yeah to more like this partner where the client kind of sees you as the expert sees you as the guide and you're seen more as like a creative problem solver rather than a gun for hire does that make sense it does and i think every creative person wants to be
seen as that strategic partner who's a guide absolutely so i'm going to use some kind of real world examples here i'm going to use some examples and case studies from my clients and this is stuff that we've actually been doing throughout the pandemic and throughout covid these are pretty recent case studies so
i'm going to talk a little bit about alessandro who is an animator and he's one of these guys top of the game you know really really good at what he does but he was a little bit frustrated because he wasn't really kind of getting the budgets and and the the types of projects
that he wanted and he felt like he really needed help with the communication side of things when it came to kind of communicating the value of what he did um and so just by using the strategies that we're going to talk through today he managed to take a project from a kind of
12k budget that's what the client said they had and then they ended up stretching that to 25k um then we've got will who was kind of doing 500 pound logos um and is now doing more like 10k branding projects and his whole thing was he just stopped even just trying to do things
good fast and cheap and he was getting sucked into that race to the bottom um and daniel who whose average project value over the last year has increased by 200 so again right it's not all about the money but this is a by-product of it but it's also about the positioning of yourself
in relation to your clients so yeah three key ideas that you've already mentioned we're gonna sell the outcome and what we mean by that is instead of selling our services what we do which is you know logo branding animation we want to actually sell the outcome that the client is trying to get
then we're going to talk about identifying the gap and the gap is the difference between where they are now and where they want to be and then finally we're going to talk about becoming the guide so positioning yourself as the guide and as the expert so that your client sees you as a
partner and treats you with respect and takes your advice and guidance and follows your creative process ready yes sir i'm totally ready unmute myself sorry okay so let's talk about first selling the outcome and i know as you said you've already kind of spoken about this on your channel before so for anybody
that doesn't understand this concept what we're saying is we want to sell the abs not sweating in the gym and too much and too often i see creatives going out there and talking about hey who wants a logo who needs some animation who needs some social media and really if you're talking about
those things you're only really talking to a very small percentage of the market who already knows what they want and if they already know what they want they've already figured it out they're probably comparing that thing on three key factors they're probably thinking how quickly can i get it is it good do
i trust this person to deliver it is the quality good and how much is it going to cost me and we don't really want to be attracting those kind of clients that want things good fast and cheap so we want to focus on selling the outcome and that's exactly what will did so
the way that he went from doing 500 pound logos to doing 10k branding projects was that he got the client to zoom out and see the bigger picture so instead of just going okay cool what color do you want the logo and you know what kind of style and all of that stuff
he he zoomed them out and he slowed them down which was a really important part of the process and he kind of took control and he said well you know why do you want this what is this really going to going to get you and so another way to think about this is
the difference between like logical and emotional and so let's imagine let's kind of change context for a second and use a different metaphor instead of logos or creative work let's think about holidays right so the logical part of a holiday is getting on a plane and being in queues and driving to the
airport and all of that stuff that's like that's how i'm getting to the to the holiday but the emotional part that you think about when you're booking a holiday is actually being on the beach in the sun right so if you imagine travel agents sold hey this plane is amazing it's got these
engines and like the seats are really comfy and you know and they started banging on about all of the ways that you're going to get to your destination the only people who'd be interested would be airplane enthusiasts right most people don't want to think about the actual logistics of getting there they just
want to get there and so the way that we do this for our clients is we talk about what is the goal behind the goal because most people will come to you and say i want this and as creatives often it's so easy to say okay well i can do that and this
client has this budget and i would quite happily be paid to do that so i'm just going to go and do it and i'm not going to stop and and question it and i think just quickly something that's kind of come to my mind is i remember i watched a video on on
the channel the other week and you were talking about pricing and you were talking about the different price brackets right and you said like this is for say kind of 5 000 projects this is for like 20k and this is for like 100k um i think just as a kind of caveat or
side note this is typically if you have a decent amount of industry experience so my clients tend to have kind of 10 years plus industry experience and they're at that ceiling where you're you know you're good at what you do and you could be charging more but you just don't know how to
go about it and you know there's a bigger problem to be solved but you just don't know how to go about it um this isn't and i think you said quite rightly if you're in that stage where it's very transactional and you're maybe a slightly earlier in your career you don't want to
be questioning every single project um and i think that's like quite an important point um so services versus outcomes right it's like what they say they want versus what they really want and i believe as creatives it's our job to figure that out to figure out what they're really trying to achieve and
if a we can even help them and be what that process is going to look like what that process is going to look like to get them to that end destination because you know if you're a pilot and if you go back to the holiday analogy and somebody wants to get there in
a way which is dangerous or isn't going to get them there in one piece then a pilot's not going to do that so i'm going to take that risk now we're not dealing with people's lives here but we are dealing with people's money and their time and their energy and i think it's
our responsibility to to make sure that we're using that in a way that's actually going to get them to where they want to be is this kind of uh is this kind of making sense so far chris yes it is and i want to say something so before that one image with the
person with the massive six or eight pack abs versus the sweat so what we're talking about here is when you're talking about what you do for clients to really focus on the results of what the surface is all about so you're you're saying like six pack abs versus 60 minute workouts and it
seems so obvious to us when you when you bring up that analogy or that metaphor but more often than not creative people are stuck talking about the workout like oh i'm going to make you sweat it's going to be really hard and i have a great gym and i have many many years
of coaching people instead of saying do you want six or eight pack abs by christmas or not yeah absolutely big difference right yeah and i think the trap is that we we get nuanced because we care about the creative process because we are creatives and i often see a lot of people and
you've talked about this before chris you know let's say you're a designer and cool talk about the creative process but then they go and create an instagram account which is all about how they design a logo and all of this stuff and it's getting loads of traction and loads of likes but then
they go i spend five hours a week on this and i've got to 20 000 followers but i've never got a single client through it and it's like well because the content isn't for your clients the content is for fellow designers they're the people that are getting value from that and they're the
people that are geeking out on that most clients don't kind of care about the nuances of that like most people getting on a plane don't want to know how the plane flies they just wanna they just want them to get it to the other destination as quickly as possible and safely and comfortably
right yeah they want a comfy right they want to make sure uh that there's good service and ample leg room and maybe movies that are new and relevant yeah yeah yeah absolutely right um cool so um i know you were doing this on the stream is there is it like any because i'm
going to move on to the second part now about identifying the gap is there anything that's kind of come through anybody like needs a bit of clarity or has any kind of questions on that or do you have anything yeah no i i was looking at the comments they're already liking what's going
on and i just want to let everybody know matt shared the deck with me beforehand i'm telling you it's going to be a really solid one especially if you're looking to get more clients so go tell a friend share the link somewhere and that's what i was doing earlier when i was meeting
myself i was pushing it out on twitter facebook and elsewhere just to let people know hey tune in on this or tune in to this program so that you can learn how to sell and close more clients and matt's really kind of doing a mental shift for us because you're the character in
the story here you want more clients he's already identified that gap he understands the challenges so he's kind of this could be very meta if you really think about it and one of the issues that generally comes up is that creative people when somebody comes to us and they say i need a
new logo we switch into like this pavlovian response like that must be the real problem and now i'm only going to focus on the logo we never spend the time to engage with the clients and ask them questions to surface the deeper problem and we're always staying on the surface we're being superficial
and i think it's a it's part and and tell me if you if you see different matt is that we're trained as creative people and there's a culture of this it's just a focus on the craft we celebrate craftsmanship we celebrate how hard you worked on something we celebrate our obsessive eye for
detail that we zoomed in so tight that we we never even asked somebody like what does the new logo do for you what's it going to do for your business and why does this even matter and as soon as you start to do that your clients are going to step back and say
wait whoa you're not like the 15 other logo designers i've spoken to they're just like what colors do you want what are your favorite typefaces what does it look like and then they just go off to the races and so if you want to move away from that order taker where the client
is hovering over your back over your shoulder to someone who they see as a valuable partner and therefore commands more money you have to start to really ask those questions and this is what matt's talking about yeah and i think as you were talking there the other element involved is probably the element
of fear fear that if i ask too many questions then this person might change their mind or you know i just want to kind of get my head down and get on with this thing because i know i'm good at it um i don't want to rock the boat too much so yeah
i think um that's something as well that's like it's very a lot of the discomfort that comes from sales comes from focusing too much on ourselves you know like oh what's the client going to think of me or what about if i say this and it's wrong rather than actually just being able
to shift that focus like you said it's almost like that mental shift that mental focus and shift it outside of yourself and put it on the client and be curious and be like cool tell me more like why have you decided that you need a new brand why have you decided that you
need a new logo that's interesting and not being afraid that maybe they don't right and i think you know sales as service for me like kind of i know this is a bit of a coachy term but kind of serving people is like the reason i love it is because i know that
when someone hops on a sales call with me my intention is that whether they become a client or not i would have i'll give them some value on that call i would have asked questions that other people haven't asked and i will get them more clarity i'll get them more perspective than they
had before they hopped on that call with me right and so that's exciting i know i'm giving something it's not just about me winning a client or getting paid for what i do and i think the creatives that i've coached once they get in that mindset of service they enjoy those conversations they
invite those conversations and then their clients start seeing them as oh you know you should go and talk to chris because we chatted and it wasn't a good fit for us but i got so much clarity and he gave me so many ideas like you should totally go and talk to him and
that's the kind of brand that you start building as this kind of creative problem solver and that just amplifies and if you do that consistently then you become kind of over subscribed when more people want to work with you than you have capacity for um but getting a little bit segwayed so let's
uh so that's all about selling the outcomes so yeah if you just tuned in um it's about not selling services services are you know just saying cool here's a new logo and it's about selling outcomes so what they really want to look more professional to have more inquiries to have more engagements and
the way that you you find that is to dig for the goal behind the goal so instead of just taking surface value what they present to you actually digging a little bit deeper asking some more questions the second big idea that i want to share with you is this concept of identifying the
gap so the gap is really simple it's the gap is between the difference between where they are now and where they want to be and i like to imagine it in my head as kind of two islands right now they're on island a and they want to get to island b you know
island a is not that cool it's just got some rocks and some trees but island b it's got some palm trees it's got a cave like they can shelter there it's got some water it looks pretty cool right um and so your job is to figure out where are they now like what's
currently going on in their world um where do they want to be and why is that important so the goal behind the goal and then kind of what's standing in their way um so let's go back to alessandro that we talked about at the start um i did a little interview with him
and i said you know what was the thing for you what was the if you just had to take one key idea from being able to take that project from you know double the project value basically he said you know it's just about asking better questions and listening and really being willing to
challenge the client and really figure out what that gap was because if you think about the gap and you think well let's imagine someone said i've got to cross this this is the gap um how much are you going to pay someone to help you get to the other side like near that
mountain range versus you know here in the uk and london we have tube and everyone says mind the gap right but really it's like a half a foot right so if you don't know what that gap is or the client doesn't see that gap and they think well it's just a small gap
but it's just a logo right how hard does it take like people can design those things in a couple of hours that's a tiny the gap is tiny i don't have a logo right now and i want one and it takes a few hours to make one so not much of a big
gap but if you zoom them out and you really get to understand well where are they trying to get to like what what do they think that logo is gonna allow them to do and you start questioning some of those things all of a sudden they say oh actually yeah maybe it isn't
quite as simple as just you go away and draw something pretty and you have a logo maybe there's more to this and yeah maybe i don't really know what my brand represents maybe i don't know who my ideal client is all right and so they start to see that this gap is much
bigger than they originally perceived i really like this metaphor actually too because you're talking about finding a big problem and helping the client to understand it not just for them but for you because this is not just purely sales you really do need to understand the bigger problem so when you say in
in the tube mind the gap is that little edge between the platform and the train some people do get tripped up on that and it could be hazardous it could lead to an injury but really if the client says i need a new logo or a new website they might be pointing to
that little six inch gap between the platform and the train and your job is to say well where are you going like once you get in the train and what does that mean to you and then you start to understand the connection between their ultimate goal versus this the small goal that's presented
in front of you absolutely yeah taking that metaphor to a whole new level i love it that's why that's why you're here man um cool so this is like the thing that as creatives we really need to get our head around is like the client's perception of that gap will always be the
determining factor of how much they're willing to invest and when i say like how much they're willing to invest i don't just mean money i mean time i mean energy and money right because if you think about it when you really help somebody it's not simply just the case of them saying i
need a logo i mean we're talking about logo design a lot but you know let's switch up kind of uh creative skill set let's talk about like animation or something it's not quite as simple as just saying i want some animation and you go away and you create it because there's so much
unknown there and so their perception of that process is the thing that's going to determine how they view it so for will he didn't the the crazy thing about this and it's almost like one of those click bait headlines it's like from 500 pound logos to 10 000 branding projects without doing any
more work because really he he's not i mean he is doing more work but not in proportion to the amount of money that he's charging what he's doing is he's showing his process to his clients and he's helping them to understand what that gap really is so by slowing them down and saying
okay whoa whoa like this is what you say you want but let's take a step back let's look at this gap and let's figure out what's going on and let's figure out you know what problem you're really trying to solve and why you think it's a problem all of a sudden they have
these realizations that they had a lot of assumptions about things or they had a lot of beliefs about things that weren't necessarily true and so they start to uncover all of this stuff and this is what we're going to talk about in the final part about being the guide is how you uncover
this kind of unknown problem but when you do that and you you have a process that you take your client through he was already doing that stuff behind the scenes when he was designing logos he was already doing the market research and all of that stuff but he wasn't kind of involving his
client in the process so it was like his creative vision of it rather than what the client actually needed right so you've got to kind of be open and get the client involved in that so that they understand the the kind of journey they understand like if we go back to the kind
of gap metaphor they understand that if they're going to get to those mountains it's not quite as simple as just rocking up in a pair of beach shorts and just walking there right there's some things that we need to think about before we go on this journey and like there this is a
this is an epic journey that we're going to go on it's not just the case of um just rocking up um does that make sense any other any kind of thoughts or questions to add to that chris makes sense and people are loving it so i think you may have a couple people
here who know you so i'm just chatting with them right now just to make sure that you do know them okay cool so they're happy to see you okay good happy to see them whoever they are um yeah cool so to identify the gap we've got three questions um where are they now
this is this is for the client by the way where are they now um where do they want to be and what's standing in the way and so at the end i'm going to share this kind of three-step process with you i want to share these ideas with you first and then i
want to show you how we can condense them into something that you can actually take into every single sales conversation and have it in front of you you know whether it's on your screen or i actually have an evernote where i have these sections and i take notes under each section so i
kind of know where i am in that conversation but you ultimately to start with that that gap is about where are they now where do they want to be and what's standing in the way and they're three essential questions that you must be asking on sales conversations in order to make this transition
from worker to partner in order to open up the opportunity to have bigger budgets and essentially like more creative control and to kind of position yourself as the expert so that's the second big idea that i want to share with you um the third and final idea that i want to share with
you is this concept of becoming the guide i've left this till last because there's slightly more i suppose tactical or nuanced things in this section that probably would be good for me and you to talk through chris and maybe use some examples so that people really get it if they've never kind of
thought about things in this way before sometimes it's it's a little bit of a mental shift that doesn't happen straight away so the concept really is like we don't want to go up the mountain as the donkey right nobody wants to be the donkey carrying the bags um it's not a fun job
and also like there's lots of donkeys and donkeys don't get paid much to carry bags up mountains right we want to position ourselves as the guide we want to be the person that is helping our clients to avoid pitfalls to get to their destination safely and the the way fundamentally that we do
this once we understand where they are where they want to be and what they believe is standing in the way we then need to dig further and ask questions to uncover things that they might not have spotted or might not have seen so there's this great um kind of saying that i've paraphrased
a little bit lots of different people say it one of my mentors a guy called takimore he says it a lot but essentially like when you can articulate your clients problems better than they can you gain their permission to solve them and ultimately yeah go on like again okay ultimately becoming the guide
is about doing that but you can't do that until you've done the first part okay because you can't attract the type of clients that you want until you start selling outcomes you then can't understand or articulate the problem until you know where they are now where they want to be and what they
believe is standing in the way and then the this part is about digging and asking the right questions to help them realize that maybe they've got some assumptions or maybe there's some things that they don't know or they didn't realize were problems for them to have those kind of light bulb moments so
i want to share this with you i came up with this a while ago it's one of those things where i just woke up one night and i was like oh my god that's totally it that's how you create a light bulb moment for somebody so i talk about this concept of the
light bulb moments we've probably all had them um they're just when someone explains something in a way where you just haven't thought about it like that before and you kind of go bing you get this this light bulb like this idea like oh my god that makes so much sense and i realized
there's actually kind of a bit of a formula for creating these light bulb moments for people what most people do is they go out and they just talk about the solution on the far left so they start with the solution hey you know is again the difference between selling even if it is
the outcome um even if we're selling outcomes rather than services it's still a solution hey do you want this and they just go to the market and to the client hey do you want this and that's cool because some people do want that but where a light bulb moment moment happens is where
you first meet the client where they're currently at so the client is walking around with some undesirable symptoms some things that they're experiencing they probably don't want to be experiencing and so if you just go hey here's the solution to this you know as humans the first thing we think about is well
why should i trust this person or hmm they're probably just saying this is the solution because they want me to buy that right but if you start with the symptoms if you start with what they're currently experiencing so you know do you find that you're you're looking at your instagram and you're posting
every day and you'd feel like you're doing all the right things but when you look at it you're just not getting the engagement you want right that's what people are currently experiencing the second part is the assumption that they have about the symptoms they're currently experiencing and most clients most people who aren't
you who aren't the expert in this particular thing will have some false assumptions or they will be doing some things which are mistakes they might be thinking in certain ways they might be doing certain things which are mistakes right so let's take this stay with the instagram and maybe chris you could chime
in on this because you're the instagram expert right so if someone's doing that if someone's going on instagram and they they feel like they're posting they feel like they're using the right hashtags but they're not seeing this exponential growth what are some like assumptions that they have about why that's why that's happening
their assumptions are going to be that um none of this works yeah this doesn't work social media is stupid yeah social media doesn't work for me yeah and uh you have to buy followers you have to be famous you have to be rich you have to have something some crazy trick that's usually
what they say yeah or maybe like the algorithm the algorithm doesn't like me or the algorithm is like broken right i've been shadow banned yeah yeah yeah absolutely um so as the kind of guy that's built a big instagram following what's the real problem like what's actually going on for those people do
you think what do i think is going on with those people like the real problem yeah what's the real problem the real problem is this is that they are trying to find some cookie-cutter solution and just slapping it on and not really putting a real effort into it i know this from a
lot of things whether you talk about exercise building your business building a sales funnel or posting on social media people are doing it almost out of self-obligation that they should be doing and they don't wholeheartedly believe that they should be doing it and so they create content that looks just like everything else
that sounds like everything else there's no voice or story in there and it literally feels like copy paste and and i talked about this before uh copy paste is not a social media strategy it's not a viable one and that's what they're doing and and i look at it and say why would
i want to read or look at this post it doesn't help me it doesn't serve me and it feels often times self-serving yeah absolutely right so it's like you think that instagram or like social media just doesn't work but the reality is it does work but just not if you copy everybody else
because it's already been done there's nothing new so the the um the engagement or the algorithm favors things that are are new and are shareable and relevant to them and so you know the problem like you just said is that they're not putting any of their personality into it they're not talking about
or posting content that's valuable for the people they want to reach all of that kind of stuff right and so you're like ah you have that light bulb moment like i'm focused on the wrong things so you've shown me a problem that i didn't know existed i thought the problem was something else
and what's cool about that is two things happen number one i no longer have any ego attached to it because i didn't know it existed just now so what people do is they they attach themselves to their problems and they create this kind of like mindset of oh well social media just doesn't
work for me and blah blah blah and they build this whole story around it so if you can bring something to the table which they didn't even know before and you say hey wait like here's the reason look you're so focused on this but actually this thing is over here then it allows
them to kind of remove their their own kind of like identity from these problems and see something in a fresh way and so then when you present a solution which is hey let me show you how to build you know an instagram following authentically and and do it in a way that's actually
going to get you the right kind of people etc etc then i trust you because you've just shown me something that i didn't know existed right so the cool thing about this is it works in in so many different ways like so many different industries so many different things there's no this isn't
just something that applies to like instagram or coaching um and like all of your kind of content or conversations if you think about this formula and you take people around in this direction you'll have so much more success with people and it will change how they perceive you than if you just go
hey chris i know why your instagram following isn't where you want it to be because you're not doing this and you're like well you just feel a bit attacked right yep or like someone's just trying to sell you something of course you're just going to give me this new solution i've tried everything
but if you start with the empathy and you start really understanding what they're experiencing then there's so much more power in that because you're already on their side and it's cool because the more you kind of relate this to what you do the more you can be empathetic so when i'm coaching my
clients i don't just go oh man you freelancers are stupid like you don't know how to sell anything this is how you do it you know because that's how you come across a bit of a douchebag quite frankly um you uh you've kind of got to relate to it because like i the
reason i know this stuff because i made these mistakes so you know if right now you're experiencing that frustration where you know you should be charging more money you know you've got a load of experience but you keep your clients keep beating you down on price or they keep telling you there's someone
out there cheaper like i know exactly how you feel i used to feel like that all the time and it was frustrating as hell and i used to believe that it was my clients like my clients just didn't see the value in what what i did right and and like they're idiots so
i just need to find better clients that do understand the value of what i do but then i realized the clients that really do understand the value of what i do are already out there paying lots of money to fix that problem they're at stage four of the decision making process right they've
already realized what the problem was they've done their research they've found a solution and they're already out there they're googling it they're asking their friends all that kind of stuff right and so i'll tell a story you know about one of my mentors that kind of helped me realize this and how i
changed it and so the real problem isn't your clients it's about how you're communicating with your clients so let me show you a strategy to help you communicate with your clients in a better way that will position you as a partner rather than a worker beautiful now before we do that the person
that knows you or has had smashed some tequila with you as he said his name is lee so you may or may not remember him because you guys are probably pretty drunk but lee i just wanted to say hello he goes by wise old sage on youtube so yeah he's uh he's my
fellow dj back in the day immediately used to dj together he taught me everything i know about djing so nice to see you um so just quickly going back through this concept because i know some one of the biggest things people struggle with is really differentiating the symptom from the problem because often
we can see what the problem is but the client doesn't know that and i'll talk about the three different types of problem in a minute so let's that's translated to something um that isn't related to creativity like the you know if you're having headaches all the time well that's the symptom but you
might think well the reason i'm having headaches is because i need glasses and so you might go into a glass shop or you might start looking at adverts for glasses right but if you went to the doctor who is the expert they're probably going to run some tests and they'll find out actually
it's not that you need glasses it's that you've got a food intolerance and so the solution is to change your diet now let's translate that to marketing if you were walking along and you saw a big billboard that said you know like this diet is amazing it's let's say the food intolerance was
dairy right um all the benefits of a dairy-free diet and people's listed all of the benefits of the dairy-free diet you're just going to ignore that doesn't it doesn't like appeal to you because you don't know that that's the solution to the problem that you currently have and that's the bit that most
people miss the people that have figured that out that have realized they've got a diet intolerance they're already going out there in the market looking for the solution and most of the time they want things good fast and cheap so if we can when we're going to find potential clients if we can
talk about the symptoms they're experiencing rather than what the root problem is then we will get much more traction because they're the people that we can create light bulb moments for right they're the people because they don't understand they don't know fully what their problem is yet so i've tried to explain this
in a couple of different ways the other way to talk about this is three types of problem there's the known problem that's spoken so the client says i know this is my problem and they tell people this is their problem right so our website's not getting enough traffic there's the known problem and
the unspoken which is kind of like a deep fear so our website's not getting any traffic but really you know the problem is that we just neglect our website and we just we never really put any work into it and i don't even really know where to start with it i just find
the whole thing a bit confusing that's probably not what they're going out there and saying they're probably going out there and just saying our website doesn't get enough traffic right when they're talking to like friends and colleagues and stuff our website is rubbish it doesn't get enough traffic but deep down they know
that they don't put enough time into it or they find it confusing they find it hard to update all of that stuff right then the unknown and unspoken problem is the one that you help them to figure out so if you were a website expert you would have a conversation with a client
and you would they they would probably if you ask them the right questions tell you that they found it difficult to update and all of this stuff and you'll probably realize that the problem is that they've got this website that's built on an outdated cms system that makes it really painful for them
to add content so the reason they're not adding regular content and not ranking you know in in google i almost forgot what it was called um it's because it's it's a painful process for them to to put content out there right um and they don't know what content to put out and so
the more you dig the more you get down to this thing where they go i actually that is the problem i hadn't really thought of it like that and that's the point when you transition from just being a guy that can build a website or a girl that can build a website to
actually a creative problem solver and the beauty is when you have tools and resources and frameworks that allow you to do this you can actually start creating digital assets like you guys have got you know videos courses workbooks one of my clients daniel he's really created this really cool like brand scorecard recently
right and it actually helps him to identify these unknown problems by scoring clients ask certain questions that he would usually ask in a sales conversation and scores them in certain areas and so coming into that sales conversation he already has the insights and he already knows what kind of questions to ask and
to help them get to that a lot faster because they've already gone through that process right um yeah chris is there anything you want to kind of add or ask with this with this concept yes uh but before i do that so let me try to get this straight up here let me
do this i'll switch over here in case you're joining us who are we talking to we're talking to matt essen he's a business coach and he's his mission is to help freelancers and agencies get clients that their dream clients essentially and uh the the question that i saw on online is this is
that uh sahana is joining us i look probably maybe a little late she's starting to get a little lost here so maybe we can do a quick recap as to where we're at in the story here yeah awesome right so we're kind of at the the final part um of the whole process
so maybe what i'll do actually just quickly for everybody is just um kind of talk about the the process in the three steps that i see them so okay the the concept overall is to be able to sell your services without feeling salesy um and without making your clients feel like you're just
trying to sell them something and if you can do that properly you go from being a worker or like a creative monkey to a partner to somebody that actually solves a problem and that is viewed by your clients as like an expert in something a creative problem solver which allows you to have
more creative freedom it allows you to charge more money and it allows you ultimately to make more of an impact for your clients which for me is the most important thing you know that the work you're doing is actually getting them a result is actually helping them to solve a problem and there's
three parts to this process the first part is to discover and that's all about asking discovery questions to identify the gap and so we talked about the gap being the difference between where they are now where they want to be and what they think is standing in the way so before we do
anything we need to know those three things we need to kind of know the lay of the land as it were and then what we can do is we can dig down and ask some more intelligent questions to identify some assumptions so when i'm on a sales call and this isn't just with
coaching clients you know i walk my clients who are freelancers and agency owners through this same process i'm getting them to listen out for the assumptions the beliefs that the client has about why they are where they are and what is stopping them getting to where they want to be and that's the
kind of diagnosis part so if you imagine like a doctor you're going to a doctor's office what's brought you here today okay and how long have you had these symptoms and he's doing he's doing the the listening part right when you go and diagnose you do the tests you find out what what
they're currently eating and all these all these different things and what their habits are and usually if it's something like we spoke about before you know usually there's something that they're doing which is creating the thing that they're experiencing so in the creative world it's their current pattern of thinking or their current
actions around a particular challenge that is creating their results so for example a lot of people in the creative world i'll give you a tangible example from coaching is a lot of people the thing they're experiencing is that they can't charge a lot of money for what they do now when i dig
down to it and when i ask some questions what i find out is fundamentally they don't believe that their work is worth that much right so they have a belief that it's a nice to have or they have a belief that small businesses won't pay decent money for logos so when i diagnose
it i'm thinking what i'm listening right now what i can hear is your pattern of thinking is currently causing you to experience these symptoms right and and it's a false belief because i've got clients like will for example who took an average project value from 500 pounds to 10 000 pounds predominantly works
with charities and not for profits and so i might hear something like that i might hear a belief or something that they say like oh well you know social media just doesn't work for me well websites just don't work for me so when i move into the diagnose part i want to bring
that up because that's usually the objection when you propose a solution which is part three the objection around that solution is usually going to be the assumption or belief that they have about those challenges so all right chris it's great you can help me grow my uh my instagram but i don't think
that's gonna work for me so if you don't address that in the sales conversation if you don't address those assumptions and those beliefs and those action mistakes and those thinking mistakes then you're never going to get them to buy into the solution does it was that a kind of fairly yeah i think
you did a great job of giving us the high level overview and recap there okay good yeah so that's essentially how these things all fit together um and i like to keep this kind of as simple as possible so that every time you go into a sales conversation with a client you think
where am i in this process have i really discovered where they are now where they want to be and what's standing in the way and often i will actually break those three things down separately and before i move on to the next part let's say you know me and chris are chatting and
chris says hey matt you know i'm thinking i need a business coach um and i say cool chris well tell me about what's currently going on in your business um before i move on to the bit of like well where would you love to be i would say cool so from what i
understand this is what's currently happening in your business is there anything i've missed there and so that just gives the client an opportunity to just cover everything off and just know that you're both on the same page so it's almost like just clarifying where i am in that sales conversation before i move
on to the next stage um so that's kind of i'm not sure how we're doing for time because i haven't actually looked at the clock sorry but that's kind of um that's the overview i know we maybe whiz through that a little bit but no we got it and hannah who was a
little confused said thank you very much matt uh she's gonna go back and watch that again so thanks for doing that let's jump into discussion in q a mode there were some questions and jonah you're gonna have to help me comb through some of the questions i think i just want to also
say welcome to all 422 people who are watching we grew from initial count about 150 so it's letting me know that this content is resonating with them and some people are like whoa this is a huge mindset shift this is like mind's blown that kind of thing okay so here's a question that
comes in from eduardo his question is this if the client's goal is to increase sales through a website he feels it's out of his control should he be focused more on converting visitors into leads something he can control okay so the question is that the client's goal is to increase sales right okay
and he feels like that's out of his control yeah and so his question is should i be focusing more on conversions right yes converting visitors into lead to the other website yeah so again without knowing too much about this particular project um if your client doesn't know that that's outside of his control
so he's probably got some assumptions about what needs to happen for them to increase sales right so you might so you might start along that line of questioning so tell me more about like what you think needs to happen to increase sales or where your thinking is around increasing sales and then i'll
just be really curious so i'll be like okay okay cool so like how much traffic do we get already and then i would work out if their goal really let's say their goal is to increase sales well why well because we want this amount of revenue okay why why do you want that
and then figure out okay well what they really want is they want an extra 40 profit margin or something right i might then look at well is that the only way to get that is is the only way to get that by increasing sales to the website or would it be better if
that is in your control as a solution that you know would potentially achieve that outcome or would it be better to actually just increase the conversion rate on the website and get more sales that way have i kind of kind of yes i think you've answered it and eduardo let us know if
you if you have a follow-up to that we'll we'll we'll do our best to answer that question difficult i was going to say the difficult thing with um sales related questions is when you don't know enough context about the client situation it's almost like a lost in translation thing and you're kind of
like well i would ask them this question so you kind of almost have to go off ask them that question what do they come back with yeah so i'm gonna make some assumptions here as to what ed eduardo was asking what his point was here which is i think he's concerned about making
a promise that he can't deliver on so if the client says i want to hire you to get me more sales and his his reaction to that is i don't i can't promise that so maybe i can promise you i can help your conversion ratio to increase i can help generate leads but
it's your team that ultimately takes the call that it's going to decide whether or not they convert into actual sales but we can we can definitely do something where we're we're qualifying prospects and getting them to reach out to you to book an appointment for a conversation and so if that's the question
most definitely never ever ever promise something you know in your heart you can't do and can't control so the best that you can do in this situation is ask the client as matt had already pointed out is how do we get more sales because that's your ultimate goal and then you have to
take a step back well we need more qualified people to call us well how do we know they're going to be qualified what metrics are you going to use to measure how they're qualified well if they have at least ten thousand dollars to spend on doing x y and z then they're qualified
and if they are willing to make a move in the next one to three months then we okay so we can design a funnel to get there so let's establish the baseline of what you're getting today in terms of conversion and traffic and so it's probably going to be a multi-prong approach but
now you truly understand what the real problem is so the client expresses a known goal and they speak it out and you're like okay that's a good goal we understand that's really clear but now we have to start to figure out how we're going to get there and that's usually where you're sitting
around and talking to them and helping them to get clarity and and i i cannot say the quote but what matt said which was if you help to express and articulate the client's problems better than they could do themselves initially you have permission now to be the person who's in charge more or
less i hope i didn't butcher that too bad yeah i mean by the time we all like when when jonah says it'll be slightly different by the time we get there it will be like a completely different quote because i've paraphrased this several times so yeah but yeah the essence of it is
exactly that yeah absolutely okay um we'll wait for eduardo to see if there's a follow-up there's a little bit of delay oh here it says yes i want to charge more okay that's some other thing john is there another question yeah from donald gray ii he asked in your discovery call would you
recommend asking what they've tried how it's working so far why they believe it is or isn't helping them achieve their outcome yeah absolutely yeah i think everyone has such great names on youtube don't they um they do uh yeah absolutely right so my discovery call is always a fairly short call um usually
15 to 20 minutes and i always pre-frame that what i mean is i always tell the client that that's what it what it's gonna be um and i want to my kind of outcome for that call is to figure out if we can even help them right so like it's kind of a
qualifying call um but i don't like to call it that because it sounds a little bit um like emotionally detached um but it's like yeah i wanna on that call the number one thing i wanna do as quickly as possible is establish that gap is there a gap how big is it what
is it right so absolutely like what have you tried before to overcome this um why why do you think that didn't work and again i'm listening for assumptions beliefs patterns of thinking um so cool where are you right now what's going on what have you tried what are you currently trying where do
you want to be what do you believe is standing in the way and then pretty quickly i can get an idea of whether i can help them a lot of the times within the first five or ten minutes they will give me something which is a belief or an assumption about why they're
currently experiencing that and most people a don't spot it and b ignore it even if they do because they don't want to question people too much or they don't want to challenge their clients too much but that's the goal that's the value so you know let's go back to the instagram example with
chris it's like oh you know well i've tried all this stuff but instagram just doesn't work for me like i just don't think it works in my industry so right there i would pick that up i'd be like cool tell me more about that why do you think that like how did you
come to that conclusion and i'd kind of pick up that that pattern of thinking because if they lead with that no matter what you do you're never going to be able to help them does that make sense yeah it's interesting how you uh handle an objection like that so one of the techniques
that i like to use a lot is just to agree with them and it's maybe reverse psychology i don't know what it is or maybe it's fake empathy i don't know what it is so if somebody says to me you know instagram doesn't work i'm like yeah it probably doesn't work why are
you even bothering to do it yeah so my first check with them is are you sure you really want this because it's not easy nothing worth having is easy and so then that's like no i really do well why is that important to you your life your business your happiness your self-confidence your
well-being they're gonna have to tell me and so then i can then ask them another question is is the effort that you're putting into this equal to the outcome that you hope to have and that's usually the reality check moment yeah absolutely i just want to help them think that's my main job
help them think absolutely yeah exactly i think one of the things that i've experienced is that in general um and again this comes up more when you're selling kind of higher ticket um things whether it's branding or animations or whatever um in general if you don't spot the assumption early on or you
don't you don't address it let's say like you just did um it comes up again when you present the solution so like oh yeah that's fine but i just don't feel like this will work for me because and if you haven't addressed it then you can't say well okay i hear what you're
saying but tell me like when we first started speaking you said this am i right and then we kind of talked that through and the conclusion we came to is this and they go oh yeah actually yeah yeah that does make sense and they kind of go into that default like well this
won't work for me or you know i don't have the money or i don't have the time or you know the kind of standard standard objections so i'm looking for like what is that thing because it's usually the same thing that's keeping them stuck it's that belief that will stop them moving forward
is the same thing that's currently keeping them stuck where they are you know you just said something that triggered some thought in my brain here is that as creative people we're we're kind of conflict averse when we see something that's going to be a potential bit of tension we we want to move
around it and away from it because we don't want to fight we don't want to feel that tension and so there's a lot of apprehension around this and that's probably why a lot of people are created in the first place i want to work on my machine i want to work on my
canvas and please don't bother me too much and i hope you pay me from time to time and you just said something which really triggered something in my brain which was problems that are addressed early are less expensive to solve than problems that are identified late okay so when we hear a problem
and we know because in our gut we feel it we're like oh i i know this i can't can't deliver on this promise or i don't suspect that this is actually the real problem but because we're afraid to speak it we're afraid to address it then we just punt we kick it down
the field and then you know uh two days two weeks before the project's due and going to be shipped you put in all this effort and the bigger thing is the emotional energy that you've invested in the solution the client's like ah you know what i changed my mind this isn't really what
i want and then we get really frustrated we get really angry we go on twitter saying clients suck they're those there's the worst human beings ever i hate them i hate my life everything is stupid and you're ugly too that's usually what happens right yeah so it's not just my twitter feed that
looks like that then it's just twitter i think you know that's where they go to spew all the venom and this kind of vile energy it's because they haven't learned how to have a different mindset to frame the problem and to have the courage and the conviction to address the problem as they
hear it so when somebody says to me instagram doesn't work i'm like yeah instagram doesn't work so why are we on it i don't want to avoid that because by avoiding it first of all i neglect the person and i'm not validating what they just said my strategy is just to agree it's
a it's kind of like a slippery way of agreeing but no just why do you need to be on social media you have to tell me then and every time i hear one of these problems i'm going to bring them up again i'm going to ask them a question now the question and
and this is the art and and the the craft of asking really great questions versus low level questions it takes some experience in training and coaching and reading and learning but you learn how to ask the question to direct the energy towards the real problem yeah that's a skill that you learn right
and i think you made a really good point and and like just to add to the concept that we as creatives maybe we tend to be slightly more introverted although that's probably a generalization um but we there's definitely i see patterns in my clients of wanting to avoid conflict right or wanting to
avoid things that might rock the boat and when i found myself in that position it was a mentor that said to me um he called me out once and he was just like you need to stop being so selfish and it just like you know one of those things that just takes you
completely off guard and breaks your pattern of whatever you were thinking and i was like what like how am i being selfish he was like well in order for you to want to avoid this and in order for you to like not want to address this problem the focus has got to be
about you it's all going to be about your ego and how you feel and this what about the client imagine the clients walking towards this um like cliff and they're just about to fall off it and you're like oh i don't want to tell them in case they don't like me and all
of a sudden this shift just happened in my head of like oh man that's so true like this isn't just for me i'm not just questioning my clients for me so i get paid more money or it's for them whether we work together or not like i don't want them to walk off
this cliff so my job in this call is to say the things that i know and i believe and and i know like even if i get off a call and i've been called all sorts of things right and i've had people saying are you you're just trying to sell me this thing
and because it triggers all of their stuff now this happens way more in the coaching world than it does in the creative world because i'm going deep into people's personal stuff right but it's the same concept just an amplification but i know when i got off that call i said the things that
needed to be said whether they became a client or not i called them out on the things that were going to mean that they stayed in that same position for the next five ten fifteen years and if i hadn't said that thing because i was worried about being liked or them getting upset
or whatever and obviously you try and set with as much empathy as possible but sometimes people just need to hear the cold hard truth and i'll always try and soften it as much as possible but the thing is i that was me serving them i took my whole kind of like ego and
oh my god what they're gonna think of me out of it so that they heard what they needed to hear and they had the reality of the situation not their current perception of it yeah now i do want to say something because sometimes people can hear a message like this and misinterpret and
tweak it in their brain and it comes out very very different i do have some experience in hearing some of this feedback and and so what we're what we're not saying is this is we're not saying that your opinion is the truth like a universal objective truth but you do owe your client
prospective client or friend your version of the truth and allowing them to make their own decision because some when somebody's going to hear this like well that's the dumbest decision i've ever heard and if you do that your business is going to be ruined well yeah you don't know that you don't have
that kind of control and that's going to sound super pompous so be very very careful about adopting that kind of tone right so what matt is saying is good your application of it might not be great so here's yeah because they're going to come back and it's like well you know he's dying
i just saw this client that their website sucked and it didn't work for me yeah matt you're terrible yeah stupid you know i've got a lawsuit against me now yeah um okay i think so let me lay that people out okay yeah the way that i address that and get around of it
is i'll rarely be direct with someone i'll always frame it as a question yeah and so it's not a case of me going your branding sucks it's a me it's me a case of going well why do you think that is the case right or i'm curious to know like how did there's
things in coaching called softeners so before you're going to ask a difficult question number one i usually ask permission to ask that question i'm like can i be direct with you can i just give you my honest opinion and then i'll kind of soften that question with something like i'm curious or just
out of interest why do you think that's happening or like has this ever resonated in any other areas of your life or something i'm trying to think of like a specific question but i usually frame the difficult thing that the thing that i'm challenging i usually frame it as a question rather than
just saying that thing sucks yeah well there's a couple things i want to touch on here but before i say those things let's go back to the person walking off the cliff part okay so we're about six steps away from falling off the cliff yeah so an untrained person is gonna say hey
dummy there's a cliff there and you're gonna fall and die if you don't listen to me donkey they don't realize it but the way they say it and the phrasing and the tonality kind of sounds like that yeah so matt we're not going to jump into role play but let's just pretend like
i'm walking there's a cliff and i'm kind of captain oblivious here how are you going to frame this how are you going to soften this just relate it to the cliff because that was your analogy yeah hey chris look up and then i die yeah okay yeah it's an interesting one trying to
take my brain out of um kind of like coaching creative mode i guess i would say like um hey chris like are you aware of the direction you're currently walking in yeah of course would be like my first question [Music] and you might say well yeah i think so why it's a bit
of a weird question well it's just that i know um that there's a there's a big cliff around here somewhere um and i'm just concerned that you might be walking towards it um okay um yeah so is that what's the big deal do you know what happens when you walk off a cliff
you fall yeah and what happens when you fall you're gonna get hurt yeah so you know um is that what you want definitely not [Laughter] even jonas laughing [Laughter] [Laughter] he's trying to wrap his brain around this one matt never bring an analogy with me that you're not prepared to take it all
the way through okay yeah noted all right all right so there's a couple of things that you can do in a situation like this and i'm just thinking we we we don't like being told what to do but we're almost always okay if somebody asks a polite request of us and so a
question is and matt called it a softener a way to bridge that so if it's something if it's one of these things where you actually absolutely see somebody who's going to walk off a cliff and you kind of know what in your brain at least is to be your own truth you might
want to say hey can i just ask you a quick favor can you just pause for one second because i want to point something out to you so that's like okay so now we're going to pause because it removes the pressure of time and urgency so there are i love that i love
that right and then now we both have a moment to think it's like i'm sure you're aware of this but if you just look down a bit in about six steps i estimate that you're gonna walk off this cliff yeah yeah absolutely um and it's a difference between like internal motivation and external
motivation it's different between someone saying like hey chris like you're looking a little bit chubby i reckon you should get down the gym i know you and you kind of like looking in the mirror and going ah do you know what i'm feeling a bit overweight i should probably do something about that
they're two very different things like one's actually going to get you to go to the gym and the other one is gonna probably just piss you off yeah okay there's a question here coming in from raphael and and i wanted to ask it earlier but i didn't want to break the continuity of
our conversation which is who are some of your big influences who have shaped your thinking they like what you're saying if they want to go to the source of the source so to speak who are a couple of people that you would recommend them looking look into yeah it's a great question and
i always think that when i'm following someone um there's probably too many to list out and like you chris i've spent a ridiculous amount of money on kind of like coaches and personal development and courses and things like that um but i would say definitely kind of like a big three are there's
a one of my mentors is a very successful entrepreneur and just all-around cool guy and he was the person that really helped me to kind of figure out what i wanted to do with my life and my business and kind of the the impact i wanted to make in the world his name
is daniel priestley um and he wrote he's probably most famous book is called key person of influence really really cool but um for the maybe kind of creative business types out there he also has a really great book called entrepreneur revolution all about how um the the world is now it's there's never
been a better time to be an entrepreneur so daniel priestly definitely a really big one for me um tony robbins actually pretty influential in terms of like the mindset stuff and nlp for those that don't really know tony robbins that well which i'm always surprised when people don't know who tony robbins is
um you might have seen his netflix documentary which i don't know is necessarily a fair representation of him i think it's a great documentary but most of the time when people watch that they think it's crazy um but his early stuff i was really into his early stuff i've got one of his
books back here like awaken the giant within the kind of tools and the the mindset side tony robbins is a big believer that um success in life is 80 psychology and 20 strategy that's something that i definitely follow so a lot of the work i do with my clients is is very kind
of mindset based um who am i going to choose for the final one um there's going to be some people that are annoyed if they get left off this list i think actually right now um i'm going through a program with a guy called tacky moore um who probably won't be relevant for
most people on your channel but he's actually a coach for coaches so he helps coaches build their business um and the thing i love about tacky is he's great at simplifying really complex stuff into kind of models and diagrams and just easily like understandable things um so even if you just kind of
check him out for that side of things of how he creates content he's he's he helps coaches all the time get to like seven-figure businesses uh he's got amazing business himself he's a pretty cool guy so i'll i'll see him as well go check him out great so that's daniel priestley tony robbins
and tacky moore okay okay thanks for asking that question now i know someone's gonna message me on like instagram or something like what you didn't include me in that we've been working together for all this time it's like i was under pressure right time constraints uh deer and headlights that's what we gotta
do so we have about 13 minutes left before we wrap the show i want to ask this other question it's a little bit kind of off topic a little bit and jonah unless you have a really good one which one i'm gonna i'm thinking of reading the one from ellen ellen lauren okay
why don't you ask the one from ellen because i was gonna ask the one from mustafa go ahead okay it's uh what point in the conversation do you agree on compensation slash contract the questions alone are helping the clients so why would you build so what should you build from the qualifying conversation
um you might need to help me out on this one a little bit i'm not sure i fully understand the question can we do that one more time i think the question is at what point do you start to talk about budget and price were qualifying clients we're helping them to get clarity
where does the conversation about money start i started straight away and when i say that i don't mean i say this is how much i charge straight away but i want to get down quite quickly into you know how much is an average sale what was your revenue where do you want it
to be etc etc now i appreciate that for some creatives out there that seems like a weird and scary concept because you're like well i'm i make an animation why the hell am i asking them about their budget or whatever right or their revenue or whatever right but it is all relative so
i try and get figures into the conversation as early as possible because then i understand in relation to the problem what we might be able to get back um in terms of that right so you know if you if you say like right well we're we're a not-for-profit enterprise and we get this
much funding every year and you know like we have 100 donations etc we want to increase that to 200 donations and if we did that that would mean an extra thousand pounds of revenue you're probably not going to spend ten thousand pounds on an animation because those two numbers don't add up makes
absolutely no sense financially to spend ten thousand pounds to get an extra thousand pounds so even if it's just practice i try to get the conversation about money into the sorry yeah i try to get the conversation about money in as early as possible um because otherwise there's no reference point so i'll
give you a really tangible example like i was on a coaching call with clients the other day and we were doing this thing around pricing and i said just let me know in the chat how much money is a lot of money just what does it feel like to you it was a
lot of money and people were typing all sorts of things some people saying fifty thousand pounds some people saying ten thousand pounds and then i said is that a lot of money for a house in central london um and fifty thousand pounds by the way is not a lot of money for a
house in central london right you wouldn't get a garden shed for that so all i did was i introduced some perspective i introduced it's relative to something right something is only expensive in relation to something else and most people are judging money based on their own perception of value and that's that's sometimes
one of the biggest problems um is that they're judging what they should spend a logo on based on what they think a logo is worth but that's not what they should be comparing how much to spend on a logo it should be relative to what they're going to get out of having this
brand and logo or how big the problem is so how much money have they lost by not having the right branding or the right logo i think that answers the question yeah yes and i think it's almost the same question as mustafa would ask i'm finding it very difficult to client's budget on
a project how to get them to talk about budgets so you'll understand something everybody at the very beginning of our conversation we want to sell the results and not the thing that we make and do so what's the result the outcome and so as soon as you start to get the clients to
talk about the outcome you're going to know pretty quickly this is a big problem or this is a very small problem and if it's a small problem the budget's going to shrink and so your job is to find a problem worth solving that you can solve and then yeah and the game yeah
absolutely and it's so funny is that you've probably seen the the meme going around it's like a clint eastwood film and he's like what's your budget and the client's like how much do you charge and it's just that constant thing like backwards and forwards it's like i don't really want to know what
the client's budget is because it kind of doesn't really make a difference what i want to know is what they will potentially get out of this if we solve this problem how big the problem is because that's what the budget should be based on not just some random number that their accounts department
has kind of like pulled out of the air okay very good hey rodrigo thanks for the super chat we see you we see you okay i i have an idea i have an idea for something like that so we're currently winding down here we have a few minutes left so brace for impact
here okay don't don't worry i'll take care of you so again once again guys if you're just joining us for whatever reason if you're jumping around on the episode i'm talking to matt essem he's a life coach a coach a business coach and he's trying to help all kinds of people freelancers and
agencies to get their dream clients and you can reach out to him at matt underscore sm on instagram you can follow him there but he's also got some free resources if you go to matt sm dot co dot uk free dash resources you get a whole bunch of things there and we'll put
those links in the description below but here's what i want to do i want to deepen the learning experience so those of you guys who have been passively watching we want to become better and more effective teachers so we're going to ask you a quiz so let's see if you've been paying attention
throughout this entire stream now these are softball ones so you should be able to get these okay so here we go matt what are the three essential questions to move from order taker to expert or guide what are matt's three essential questions i'm gonna give a little bit this is where jonah plays
the jeopardy music but we don't have the license for that okay so what are the three essential questions to move from order taker to expert or guide go ahead and drop it in the comments below if you're tuning in live just go ahead and do that what are the three questions you should
know this for sure i'm gonna give you two more seconds here and here they are so the question is the questions that you're going to ask your clients are where are you now and where do you want to go or where do you want to be and what's getting in your way some
version of that are the three golden questions did i get that right matt you got it spot on okay beautiful so give yourself a giant pat on the back so yeah yeah brush off the little dust off your shoulder you got it right and we have one more quiz question here and here
we go what are the three types of problems that's a good one clients have okay we just went over this we just went over this and matt went a little dumb run donald rumsfeld on me but uh what are the three types of problems that clients have give you a couple more seconds
here go ahead and drop it in the comments here we go so the problems that they know about and that they tell you so they're known and spoken the problems they know about but they don't tell you because embarrassment or or they don't want to reveal their hand they're they're playing it close
to the chest and the last one is they don't know what the problem is and therefore of course they can't say it so the known knowns the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns that's the donald rumsfeld reference there okay back to our show yeah all right all right so jonah are there any
other questions and oh curious like how people did here i see a lot of answers here well it's just a follow-up from the budget conversation so when you talk about like diagnosing and bringing up the client's budget do you charge them for that conversation since you could potentially help them figure out what
the problem is or no um no because here you've got to figure out like let's say a client is worth 10 grand to you right how much time do you want to put into getting one of those clients and most people don't think about client acquisition like this like in in the kind
of big budget world so when i used to work in big agency world um our company would spend thousands if not tens of thousands of pounds on a pitch right we were and i'm not going to say the um agency so i think i can say this um but we were doing a
pitch for mini once and they went out and bought a mini cooper for the pitch and they shot um like a fake ad basically for the thing but the pitch was worth something like 250 grand or maybe more than that so it's a lot more than that because that's yeah for a pitch
it's good i thought you could say millions of dollars yeah it probably was i can't remember now i was just a little i was a cog in a in a big whale so i didn't know what was going on i just saw a mini driving around but um right but yeah so like
what not enough people do is they're like oh well when am i getting paid right why should i give all my ideas away for free when like i'm not getting paid it's like well if you do that consistently enough you do get paid that's the thing that gets you the job is that
you help them see that thing that they didn't see before you give them a strategy somebody else hasn't given and that's why they will see you as the expert and that's why they will pay you big money to help them solve that problem so jonah i want to read this comment for you
from from our friend anna and she's like joanna you have a nice voice you should be in front of camera i don't know about that one you'll just see me panicking the whole live stream [Laughter] okay um i i think that's all we have time for right jonah is there anything else in
here that we gotta address i like this one so one from pj ow last one what if you personally never never tested the solution but you know it works through the works of someone else um well i'd argue that you don't really know it works um if you if you just read it
in a book um it worked for them in their situation at their current time um i do this quite a lot so people always say to me well i've never done this before well imagine like if the rule was that if you've never done it before you could never do it there would
be absolutely no progress in the world um the whole reason new ideas and new inventions get made is because people try things that they've never done before right so the difference between doing it in a kind of authentic and uh like genuine way is letting the clients know all the way through the
process that this is the first time you've done it right so i i tend to do what i call like a case study program or something like that so if i come out with a brand new program that i've never run before even if i've done it one-to-one with clients if i've never
done it in that exact format before with that exact number of people i will say hey look i'm doing a case study program and now i've never done it before in this format with this kind of people but i have done it with one-to-one or i have you know read this book and
done a test in my business about it or whatever and so i'm looking for a handful of people that i want to use as case studies and i want to create some some things that i can showcase that this works for this particular situation for these kinds of people and because of that
i'm doing it at 25 off or i'm doing a full money back guarantee or whatever it is but i just make people aware i don't pretend that i've like done it before or do anything like disingenuous to make people believe that they're getting something that they're not very good very good there's some
funny chats going on right now about joan and his voice leave it there i'm helping to pour gasoline on that fire so we want to thank you matt for doing this and you and i have been chatting and trying to figure out how to help our community our people and we we moved
it from being a pro call to being something on the stream here so if you guys have enjoyed this episode do be sure to check out matt and what he's doing i'm going to bring up that screen in one second so matt on behalf of the entire team thank you for doing this
with us so here's his information the essential details if you will his deets as young people like to say matt essem he's at matt underscore essen on twitter and on instagram i checked it earlier and if you want to find out more about him his coaching programs and whatever else he's doing in
his world go to maddasm.com i'm sorry dot code dot uk free who doesn't like free free dash resources and if you want more of this go check out our episode together we did it uh episode 91 why your story is valuable you hear a lot more about his backstory and how he even
got into this space and place in the first place and that's it and i just want to uh on behalf of the entire team joining myself and matt to thank all of you for tuning in and sharing a little bit of your thursday with us thank you so much thank you for being
a part of the one billion mission everybody don't forget to like comment subscribe and hit that bell for notifications that's it for me i'm out of here i hope you guys have an amazing day jonah take us out
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