The Forgotten Method Of Signing Clients

When you are first starting out, 1000% the best way is just to do free work. It is super effective. But even if you aren’t a beginner, you shouldn’t just stop doing it either.

I’ll get to that in a second.

The reason it’s important when you’re starting is because otherwise your sales velocity (meaning how many deals you get) will be super low, which isn’t a problem because of the money - you won’t be charging that much anyway.

The reason it’s a problem to not have any sales velocity is because you won’t be able to produce any relevant proof to help you sign more clients later.

The biggest problems beginners have is that they spend so much time trying to build trust and convince people they can do what they say they can do.

If you just spent that time actually delivering the service for 5-10 free clients and generating proof, you would have a much easier time getting paying clients 60-90 days later.

Once you get the proof, you can use that to sell to new clients. Proof is the number one thing that will increase your sales velocity and make people want to buy from you.

When you are trying to charge people upfront with no proof, sales happen so slowly that you get stuck in this purgatory phase of having no proof, and no sales.

Sometimes you can get away with this by charging insane prices to clients who aren’t aware (for example charging a local business a few thousand dollars for a logo or something) but in the long term these clients realise that you are charging crazy prices for very low ROI.

On top of that, when you do free work, if your services are good there’s a strong chance you can sell to the people you gave free work to as well.

This changes the entire frame of the relationship from “I’m a sleezy salesman trying to finesse you into paying a beginner for a service they have no idea how to do” to “I’m a hustler looking to grow my business, can I give you value?”

The reason that works so well is because the only way to get paid is to capture a slice of the value you create. If you try to capture MORE value than you’ve created, people hate you and it will never last.

And that also reminds me - you can’t give someone free work unless you can create value for them. You do this by being actually good at your skill.

→ Doing free work is an easy way to get clients

→ It builds trust in the market when you have none

→ It helps you stack proof

→ You can upsell free trial clients between 15-50% of the time depending on the service

If you want help to sign your first few clients, the best place to do that would be here (link)

So now the question becomes:

When do you stop doing free work after you scale up?

My answer would be never. Here is a hypothetical:

• Let’s say you spend $200 on ads to generate a qualified “free trial” client. This is reasonable pricing because you are offering free work, which is pretty low risk. You will get leads.

• For every free trial you deliver, it costs you $200 in labour (to fulfil whatever you promised)

• So, to generate + fulfil a free trial client, it costs you $400.

• To start, you do 10 of these, which means your total spend was $4k.

• How many of those free trial clients convert to full clients will determine how hard you should go on delivering free work.

• Let’s say you close two clients at 3k/mo. You spend $4k to add $6k MRR. Is that a good deal?

Fuck yes it’s a good deal.

The keys to the puzzle:

• You have to know what it will cost for you to generate + fulfil the trial

• You have to know what your upsell % is

• You have to know what your LTV is

• You have to know your current CAC to see if the free trial method will be more efficient, or if you can get clients easier in other ways

The crux of this is just knowing your economics. If you mess this up, you can easily burn money.

If you get it right?

You will completely solve your client acquisition.

As usual, the sauce is in the details.

If you would like to see how the top 1% of agencies do it, go here (link).

Chat tomorrow.