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I feel like every post by Patrick should be printed out and taped to the wall. So many great lessons in his writing. Thanks patio! Question of my own: if yo

I feel like every post by Patrick should be printed out and taped to the wall. So many great lessons in his writing. Thanks patio! Question of my own: if you are breaking into consultancy, how do you go about cold-calling potential clients? Say you've identified a few clients that you think you could help. What kind of email do you send them? Go the honest route and say "Hey, I'm new but I want to help your business make more money...I'll take a cut of whatever increased revenue I derive, otherwise you dont have to pay me" ? Or go with the "I know what I'm doing route" and just pitch that you are a professional doing this all the time?

JagMicker 14y ago
I am not the author, but my advice would be: -Focus on the "Sales Process". You won't go anywhere without first identifying the need(s) of the prospect and making sure they know that you understand their need(s). Then determine who the decision-maker is, so you don't waste your time selling to the wrong person. -Approach prospects via email AND phone, until you've figured out which method they prefer. -Don't give up until you've received a clear rejection. Offer rebuttals to their objections. Stick with those rules, and work to refine your pitch. Persistence is key!
smiler 14y ago
I've been freelancing / consulting for just over a year myself and am discovering more of the process myself. Here's what I've done so far.. - Reach out to your existing network - if you have friends who have done freelancing / consulting, find out what companies they did freelancing / consulting for - chances are those companies still need it. - Offer to meet for coffee / lunch / dinner. I'm based in the UK and was trying via e-mail to speak to a potential client. It just wasn't happening. They are based in the US. So I called them up and offered to meet for dinner there at a time convenient for them - they accepted and I had the dinner last week. It is very easy for someone to decline a phone call / conference call. It's much harder for someone to do that when they know you have made an effort to turn up in person - they also have to eat so meal times work good. - I find being honest is the best route to go. They expect you to know what you're doing! I think it's fine to say - I've just stepped out of employment and now I'm looking to build a business myself in what I've been doing - people respect you for trying to start a business! - Don't offer to do something for free too early on. The person you're pitching to is not working for free and they won't be expecting you to work for frre either? Yes, you may need to offer something for free to land a client initially - but do not do it with open-ended development!! Instead suggest you do an analysis of their system etc and write up a report and how you'd improve things - at least that has a fixed scope. Or ask for a dataset and show simply how you can use that data to give them some new numbers they don't yet have.
- polyfractal 14y ago
  Thanks for the advice! I'll give the honesty (without self-degradation aspect) a go. I've done freelance programming in the past, but the gigs were mostly "build us a CRUD app" type jobs. Paid well, relatively easy work...but not really want I want to be doing. I'd rather be doing bigger picture work like funnel optimization, testing, metrics, etc. Unfortunately, I also don't have as much experience with this, which is why I think my default instinct was to offer "for free!" as a risk-reducer. The analysis or quick report on their processes is a good idea, and would make me feel more comfortable in the situation I think.
- roel_v 14y ago
  "I'm based in the UK and was trying via e-mail to speak to a potential client. It just wasn't happening. They are based in the US. So I called them up and offered to meet for dinner there at a time convenient for them" I'm probably missing something here, but tell me you didn't fly to the US to have dinner with a potential client you were cold-selling yourself to?
  - smiler 14y ago
    It was not cold-selling no. I had worked with them before in a different role so I was a known quantity. I also combined it with a meeting with another client I was cold-selling to - albeit through a recommendation from a friend and had already submitted a proposal. In total it cost me about $2000 but am expecting work to come from it.
patio11 14y ago
So there's some sort of difference in the neurological makeup of developers and business owners around the phrase "you don't have to pay me." Developers think that proposition decreases risk. Business owners think exactly the opposite. It suggests that there's such significant project risk associated with employing you that the market forces you to self-indemnify for that risk upfront, which virtually no other service provider they use does. (Separate from what your client thinks of it, it also puts your paycheck at the mercy of clients' ability to e.g. follow through on your recommendations. Clients generally earn the results they get from working with outside consultants, just like they earn the results they get from working with their own employees. The ones who do everything in their power to make engagements a success tend to do better than ones who... don't. You probably still want to get paid when they... don't.) I'm not totally opposed to some sort of variable payout mechanic to pricing, but the vast majority of my engagements are structured "I work X weeks at $Y per week." By the time I've sold you on the engagement, I should have been able to sell you on X$Y being an acceptable price to pay for the risk-discounted probability space of all possible outcomes to the engagement. (n.b. If you do variable payouts for anything, you need to figure out how to transfer a large percentage of the upside from the client to you for the math to work out.) If I personally was selling you an engagement, and you said "What happens if this doesn't lead to an improvement in the business?", the very next words out of my mouth will be "It is entirely possible that this engagement will not lead to an improvement in the business. The vast of my engagements have been successes. Some of them, like the ones we talked about earlier, were incredible successes. Let's talk about ways we can be more likely to make this engagement successful. If you do not believe that this engagement is likely to be successful, we will not do this engagement." (I'd also independently decline an engagement where I thought it wasn't likely to be a win or would meaningfully damage the business in event of a failure. I typically work for companies with revenues in the eight figure range -- if they set fire to my entire paycheck, nobody goes home hungry.) As to what you personally could offer for risk reducers, absent a history of doing exactly this thing before, I might suggest reaching back into your portfolio of other things you have done and showing off ones which demonstrated likelihood of success. In my first few consulting engagements, my main portfolio piece was "similar work which I did for my own business worked out well, as evidenced by a few years of blog posts; here's a few I like." After the first few engagements, well, BCC was no longer the most credible piece of evidence I could point to.

JagMicker 14y ago

I am not the author, but my advice would be: -Focus on the "Sales Process". You won't go anywhere without first identifying the need(s) of the prospect and making sure they know that you understand their need(s). Then determine who the decision-maker is, so you don't waste your time selling to the wrong person. -Approach prospects via email AND phone, until you've figured out which method they prefer. -Don't give up until you've received a clear rejection. Offer rebuttals to their objections. Stick with those rules, and work to refine your pitch. Persistence is key!

smiler 14y ago

I've been freelancing / consulting for just over a year myself and am discovering more of the process myself. Here's what I've done so far.. - Reach out to your existing network - if you have friends who have done freelancing / consulting, find out what companies they did freelancing / consulting for - chances are those companies still need it. - Offer to meet for coffee / lunch / dinner. I'm based in the UK and was trying via e-mail to speak to a potential client. It just wasn't happening. They are based in the US. So I called them up and offered to meet for dinner there at a time convenient for them - they accepted and I had the dinner last week. It is very easy for someone to decline a phone call / conference call. It's much harder for someone to do that when they know you have made an effort to turn up in person - they also have to eat so meal times work good. - I find being honest is the best route to go. They expect you to know what you're doing! I think it's fine to say - I've just stepped out of employment and now I'm looking to build a business myself in what I've been doing - people respect you for trying to start a business! - Don't offer to do something for free too early on. The person you're pitching to is not working for free and they won't be expecting you to work for frre either? Yes, you may need to offer something for free to land a client initially - but do not do it with open-ended development!! Instead suggest you do an analysis of their system etc and write up a report and how you'd improve things - at least that has a fixed scope. Or ask for a dataset and show simply how you can use that data to give them some new numbers they don't yet have.

polyfractal 14y ago
Thanks for the advice! I'll give the honesty (without self-degradation aspect) a go. I've done freelance programming in the past, but the gigs were mostly "build us a CRUD app" type jobs. Paid well, relatively easy work...but not really want I want to be doing. I'd rather be doing bigger picture work like funnel optimization, testing, metrics, etc. Unfortunately, I also don't have as much experience with this, which is why I think my default instinct was to offer "for free!" as a risk-reducer. The analysis or quick report on their processes is a good idea, and would make me feel more comfortable in the situation I think.
roel_v 14y ago
"I'm based in the UK and was trying via e-mail to speak to a potential client. It just wasn't happening. They are based in the US. So I called them up and offered to meet for dinner there at a time convenient for them" I'm probably missing something here, but tell me you didn't fly to the US to have dinner with a potential client you were cold-selling yourself to?
- smiler 14y ago
  It was not cold-selling no. I had worked with them before in a different role so I was a known quantity. I also combined it with a meeting with another client I was cold-selling to - albeit through a recommendation from a friend and had already submitted a proposal. In total it cost me about $2000 but am expecting work to come from it.

patio11 14y ago

So there's some sort of difference in the neurological makeup of developers and business owners around the phrase "you don't have to pay me." Developers think that proposition decreases risk. Business owners think exactly the opposite. It suggests that there's such significant project risk associated with employing you that the market forces you to self-indemnify for that risk upfront, which virtually no other service provider they use does. (Separate from what your client thinks of it, it also puts your paycheck at the mercy of clients' ability to e.g. follow through on your recommendations. Clients generally earn the results they get from working with outside consultants, just like they earn the results they get from working with their own employees. The ones who do everything in their power to make engagements a success tend to do better than ones who... don't. You probably still want to get paid when they... don't.) I'm not totally opposed to some sort of variable payout mechanic to pricing, but the vast majority of my engagements are structured "I work X weeks at $Y per week." By the time I've sold you on the engagement, I should have been able to sell you on X$Y being an acceptable price to pay for the risk-discounted probability space of all possible outcomes to the engagement. (n.b. If you do variable payouts for anything, you need to figure out how to transfer a large percentage of the upside from the client to you for the math to work out.) If I personally was selling you an engagement, and you said "What happens if this doesn't lead to an improvement in the business?", the very next words out of my mouth will be "It is entirely possible that this engagement will not lead to an improvement in the business. The vast of my engagements have been successes. Some of them, like the ones we talked about earlier, were incredible successes. Let's talk about ways we can be more likely to make this engagement successful. If you do not believe that this engagement is likely to be successful, we will not do this engagement." (I'd also independently decline an engagement where I thought it wasn't likely to be a win or would meaningfully damage the business in event of a failure. I typically work for companies with revenues in the eight figure range -- if they set fire to my entire paycheck, nobody goes home hungry.) As to what you personally could offer for risk reducers, absent a history of doing exactly this thing before, I might suggest reaching back into your portfolio of other things you have done and showing off ones which demonstrated likelihood of success. In my first few consulting engagements, my main portfolio piece was "similar work which I did for my own business worked out well, as evidenced by a few years of blog posts; here's a few I like." After the first few engagements, well, BCC was no longer the most credible piece of evidence I could point to.