How Professional Solopreneurs Sell: Solopreneur Insights, Vol. 5
No clients, no business. It's time to learn how to connect with prospective customers the right way.
Those of you who follow me closely on Twitter are licking your chops right now. It's no secret that I'm not a fan of conventional sales advice. The thought of telling you to send endless cold outreach messages does, in fact, make me throw up a little.
I would never tell you to resort to spamming tactics born from sales models that would delight the door-to-door salesmen selling vacuums and encyclopedia sets in 1993. This is the realm of the Sales Bros who celebrate 3% conversion rates as they watch Boiler Room and Glengarry Glen Ross on repeat to boost their fragile egos. Truly great salespeople have a disdain for this equal to mine.
As my followers know, Solopreneurs are constantly bombarded with advice that might work for some business models, but are devastating to ours. Sales definitely falls under this category.
Before I dive in, there are a few key concepts to get straight:
Sales is about truth. If you're tempted to twist or hide the truth, I'll make it easy for you: Unsubscribe .
Selling products and selling services require completely different approaches. This article addresses selling professional services, not products. Selling products is easy, and there's no shortage of good information out there.
Salespeople hand off the client to the people who actually do the work. Solopreneurs don't have that luxury.
Great customers ALWAYS have options. If you land a customer who didn't consider their options, congratulations. You just dramatically increased the odds that you landed a nightmare.
Bad salespeople: "Just trust me." Great salespeople: "Here's why other people like you trust me."
Marketing brings customers to your door. Sales goes to the customer's door. Marketing works better for Solopreneurs in the long run, but that's for another article.
How To Sell a Professional Service as a Solopreneur
As I mentioned earlier, a Solopreneur's job doesn't end once the client is signed. In fact, that's when it really begins! I need this to sink in for you. It's now YOUR job to serve the client and produce the actual work. Aren't you going to consider what that experience looks like for the client AND you?
If not, I sincerely hope that you can stomach a great deal of client and business pain, because that's what you're signing up for. I know you're smarter than that. I know you will target only the clients who are a good fit for you and vice versa.
How do you define a good fit?
Identify and Qualify the Target
Your target prospects should include most or all of the following:
You can solve their acute service needs with your skill.
You can solve their "hidden" needs. As a Solopreneur, your competitive advantage is to serve people who want their budget to go toward the work rather than agency overheads, who want direct access to the person doing the work, who value flexibility, who don't care about the "prestige" of the big agency names, and who want someone to integrate into their team.
You have experience solving their problems. If you're just starting out, you can still target them. Just be honest that you don't have experience and you fully expect to sacrifice something in return for them taking a chance on you.
You have deep knowledge of their market and their position. There's zero excuse for not doing your research and learning as much as possible.
You would enjoy working with them even when challenges arise.
They pay well or provide valuable access to work/people that you can leverage.
They offer opportunities to expand, whether within corporate departments or a network, or as a feather in your cap that you can leverage in marketing.
Tailor Your Marketing Messaging to Them
Spoiler alert: Great customers have access to the internet and they don't impulse buy. They're going to look into you further to validate anything they have learned about you. Use this to your advantage.
See, this is the interplay between marketing and sales, especially for Solopreneurs. When they see your marketing first, your discussion is a validation of the marketing message they experienced before.
When you talk to them first, your marketing validates what they learned about you in the discussion. They work together as a team.
Make sure your online presence speaks to the exact same benefits, skills, and experience that you would discuss in person with a prospect.
Send them information that is specifically tailored to them, their challenges and opportunities, and your experience solving their exact problems.
Put in the work. The people who care the most are often the ones who land opportunities. This is especially true for Solopreneurs. It's one of our core competitive advantages.
Context Matters
Let's look at a few different scenarios. For each of the below, pretend that this is the first time a qualified prospect hears about you:
You contacted them cold.
An advertisement.
You landed in their search result for a service.
They consume your content.
You legitimately connected with them through social media.
They heard you or saw your content in a professional community context (event, webinar, guest speaker, publication, website, etc.).
You were recommended to them by someone they trust.
I purposefully listed these in the order from weakest to strongest. Solopreneurs providing professional services can confidently scrap the first three. These are scattershot volume games that provide little or no context, waste time, and attract bottom-feeders. Number three might work for 2% of you, but this article can't go on forever.
For items 4-7, think about how you would speak to a qualified prospect through the lens of each.
They consume your content: You've been posting relevant, high-quality content. You see people who are routinely liking and sharing what you post. But, they're not yet buying from you. Your priority is to get to the next step.
Legitimately connect with them through social media: I'm using the word "legitimately" on purpose here. Connecting with a qualified prospect so you can pretend to be their buddy in hopes that you can make money off of them is not only gross, it's a stupid strategy for your Solopreneur business. You should be seeking people who are a good fit for you, as well. Your priority is to connect with them and get to know them. Ask them about their challenges and what they're looking for. Speak to them about broader industry issues and ideas. Give them free advice. Share tactics that you know will help them overcome a challenge. If they don't outright ask you to take their money, you can begin to share with them the unspoken truth: you feel obligated to help others with your skill, and believe you can help them. This is the "selling" part that most people don't like. Again, though, if you've done everything honestly up until this point and you KNOW that your service makes their life better, here's the reality: It's like you have a key that will unlock a door your friend wants to unlock, but you didn't tell them. How will they feel when they find out you've hidden the key from them all along?
They learn about you in a professional community context: Very little says "I solve problems for people like you" than being trusted to broadcast or publish content within a broader professional community. Your priority is to get involved with professional organizations and associate with other experienced people/groups that your prospects trust. When you meet someone in this context, your focus should be on securing meetings to discuss getting to work and executing on the strategies you shared to the group. Your access to some of the highest-quality clients lives here.
You were recommended by someone they trust: There's no easier moment to close than when someone reaches out and says "You were recommended to me." At this point, 95% of the conversation is YOU making sure THEY are a good fit for you. Frankly, if this isn't the norm for you as a Solopreneur after a few years, something is wrong. This scenario is almost completely about validation, where you shut up and ask key questions. How do you get here? By straight-up wringing out every last drop of quality that you can for your current clients. This is where you want to be.
Get Your Timing Right
Traditional salespeople want to put pressure on the prospect. Leveraging scarcity or exclusivity is a common tactic, and it's often totally fake. Professionals don't play games like this. We do, however, tell the truth. And the truth is: Solopreneurs ARE limited. Not that we can't scale (this is a core component of Solopreneurship). It's that we almost never WANT to scale beyond a certain threshold. We don't need to land millions in annual work to live exactly how we wish.
The prospect is going to assume you wouldn't take on what you can't handle. So, it's up to you to know what that limit is. If you're talking to multiple prospects simultaneously, be honest about it. Tell them that your capacity only allows for X clients over Y amount of time. If they're ready to move, then get moving. Get the deal signed. If not, tell them what time is right. Don't be too care-free about it. You're not helping the client if they come back to you next week and you say, "Oh, I got all booked up. Sorry I didn't explain that. What's your schedule in 6 months?"
And, of course, keep doing items 4-7 above, even when you're booked solid. This is how you keep the pipeline full and defeat the feast-and-famine cycle that destroys so many businesses.
The Dirty Secret About Selling as a Solopreneur
If you're constantly selling, you have a problem. One of the greatest advantages of Solopreneurship when providing a professional service is that you don't need tons of clients. The ultimate sweet spot for most of us is 6-10 great clients. I'm telling you, if you're operating your business correctly (and I know my followers want this!), then you will rarely need to do any selling at all.
Your best opportunity to get there? Doing incredible work. Over-delivering. Being all-in for the client. Studying and working every day. Learning the latest tactics and information to stay on top of your game. Networking with valuable people. Sharing your knowledge and insights. Being an authority in your industry.
Doing all of this feeds into your best opportunity for generating leads that come to you, primed, pre-qualified, and ready to sign. Next week, I'll address how you translate this to marketing that allows you to focus on your current clients and craft, rather than constantly chasing the next prospect.
Here's my breakdown for acting as VP of Sales in my business:
Yearly: 0 days
Though I've helped hundreds of individuals and dozens of companies fill their pipelines, I haven't needed to "sell" in the traditional sense for over 15 years. :)
– Torrey
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