A $16,000 deal after 44 days of lead generation on Upwork

Why I am confident that some of my customers will get deals like that and some others won’t 

Here's my offer: I won't lie to you and you won’t lie to yourself. I generate leads for marketing, design and development agencies. We do it using Upwork accounts.

Recently I was able to provide a lead that has been closed by one of my customer for $16,000. This lead came after  44 days of lead generation on Upwork and 32 leads in the pipeline. 

Now when you do that amount in a day for an agency you would like to say “I'll tell everybody my secret tactics to find the perfect lead.” But the reality is that I am not able to do that (if you want to know more, read:https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/hiring-salesman-commission-great-way-throw-money-away-luca-giovagnola/). 

I know that 65% of the conditions that helped me to achieve that result was due to the features of the services of my customer and how he was able to present himself on salesman how he is able to manage his coworkers and how he have presented his website.

Such as incredible sales in e-commerce depend on the quality of the product, incredible sales for marketing agencies depends on the quality of the service offered and how the service is presented.

IN THIS ARTICLE I WILL COMPARE the great way this agency worked to get extremely good customers and why it will probably keep getting them, while if you do not work in such a great way, you will probably never get them.

So, I present my article to you:

 Mh, mh 

The features, characteristics, services – call them what you want – THE DAMNED THINGS ARE NEEDED TO SUCCEED:

1) CLEAR SERVICES OFFERED

In this case the client has a pack of services. By a pack I mean that it is clear what will be produced. Every single word, every second spent on the customer has a defined, clear and measurable price and output. A recurrent thing for companies is to adapt the service when the client’s budget is huge (for example, over $25-50k). Adapting is possible from structuring a pack, while moving from “adapting to each customer” to a pack is a nightmare. 

The advantages of having a clear pack, where the services and output are clear and defined are: 

a) your salesman understands your services

b) your co-workers and VA understand them

c) the customer that sees decent procedures thinks that you at least have an overall idea of what you do.

Essentially, everyone else can understand your procedures and work, and that helps you to:

a) Hire better people (the clearer the service, the clearer the skills you search for on the job market).

b) Sell better (the clearer the service is to you, the clearer your explanation of it will be to your prospects, including the communication of it in documents, videos etc). 

c) If we collaborate, you'll make me happy because I will not have to guess from your website what exactly you are selling (spoiler, 89% of times it is not clear, marketers).

Quoting Mike Michalkowitz: “There are people that prostitute their business.” I know many freelancers and some agencies that will do whatever you want, if you pay them well enough. 

They’ll do design work even if they are a PPC, they will do a website even if they're supposed to do only Facebook ads. There’s no need to say it: this behaviour is toxic and easily checked for $10,000 work can easily bankrupt you if you do not know how to handle it. (For more information, add a comment below.)

2) A CLEAR IDEA OF YOUR CUSTOMERS’ NEEDS

This customer of mine has made three startups, for a general exit of $7 million in three years. His startups were in a Saas B2B niche and I knew what Saas B2B startups were looking for in their marketing.

And so he built processes to deliver the services his customers wanted.

That means you need to know who you're selling to. You’re doing the ICA, so having an ideal client avatar is the minimum. (By the way 89% of the people I meet think that anyone that would pay them is an ideal client avatar, forgetting the term “ideal”.) It should be as easy as drinking a glass of water. After that there's the real understanding of what your target client wants, divided into long-run expectations and short-run expectations. For instance, e-commerce owners expect to move from retail to online sales, scaling their e-commerce in the short run, while in the long run they expect to integrate that with the real world sales operation/ differentiate marketing processes on the internet.

I took this information from technical blogs whose audiences are e-commerce owners. I pretended to act like my ideal customer (or my ideal agency). And I understand you cannot know that if your customers are operating in 42 different types of niche. What do you lose if you don't do it? You will not be able to follow the updating of each market of the ICA, so you won't be able to update your company at the right time. Losing timing means losing tons of money.

3)         REAL HR ABILITIES

Working during the pandemic for a customer of mine, 80% of the invitations received on Upwork were from agency owners looking to externalise their services to less expensive PPC experts. The basic strategy: when revenues fall, you don’t only fire those workers you no longer have work for, you also fire busy ones by exchanging them for less expensive workers. This strategy is fine if you know how to hire people and how to select them considering their personal behaviour, their skills and expertise. Most people don't have such skills and they fail. Literally having a PPC agency in LA or NY might mean only working in the sales HR field, generating customers and giving them to real experts from all over the world. When you are working in HR you must have professional skills. It's like having a restaurant or cooking dinner at home. If you don't have professional HR skills, hire a professional.

4)         STRATEGY

This is probably the most important thing you will read in this article. Most business owners think that they will increase their margin/ revenues by doing what they are doing right now, just selling themselves at a higher price per hour. The real thing is: if you stay the same, you will fail. For a series of human biases (add a comment below to learn more) we do not perceive the future in the present, while the roots of the future are in the present.

There's a process called the product development process. This is the one you have to love. Is the process you use to improve your services just asking your customers a series of questions? (Here's mine; you can copy it if you want to https://lucagiovagnola1.wufoo.com/forms/r17jfrz1lhdrkw/). The more you keep doing it the more unbeatable your service will become. This customer of mine had 10 years of experience in marketing for B2B Saas which means: a series of excellent case studies, a clear website in which his ideal type of customer was clearly expressed. 

Do not imagine a super-well designed website: Five pages with a description for each ICA he has, each page structured with an initial situation, the solution provided and an outstanding ROAS described at the end and independently recommended. 

Nothing impossible for anyone: clear images of previous work, clear processes, clear ROAS. 

But 90% of the websites of marketing agencies I visit do not have such a presentation. 

He also had outstanding ability in selling his services, and a crystal clear idea of the services he was selling, so it was easy to hire him and to know what specific skills are needed to succeed.

He and other top clients of mine have all these features explained in point 4. Think about it.

At the end of the game he works less, closes bigger contracts and works better. He's closer to having a marketing agency that makes $1m in revenue per year than those that work 12h a day without a clear direction, because his language and his communication skills are clearer.

This clarity comes from 10 years of experience doing the same thing every day. Think about that – when you think you do not know enough and you move from Shopify to Woocommerce, or from lead generation to ads for e-commerce, think what the outstanding compound interest of 10 years of experience in a niche can give you. 

No matter how good you are, you will lose customers to those that know how to approach them better, and to know your customers better you need to know everything about them.

We live in an era when success is perceived as fast and due to anyone. It is not. Less than 0.01% of the world’s population earns $1m a year (https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-the-worlds-individuals-earns-over-one-million-dollars-per-year). The reason for that is laziness. Anyone can be an expert in his area of expertise if he spends 10 years focusing six hours a day six days a week doing it. If you want to be a sushi master or the best PPC expert in the world you need to do one thing only: keep doing the same job every day and try to do it better. 

It does not matter how many times you need to fail, or succeed; it doesn’t matter. Anyone wants to be the best; no one wants to keep doing the same thing better than anyone. It doesn’t matter if you fail; what matters is that you keep doing better every day.