Love Selling or Loathe It?
Do you have a love-hate relationship with selling your creative services in graphic or web design or illustration? While you may love winning a sale, maybe you hate the act of selling. You may feel it’s so far outside your comfort zone that you wish someone else would sell for you — if only you could afford it. When that option is out of reach what do you do? Instead of dreaming about outsourcing sales, you may choose to invest in developing your acumen for developing business opportunities as a freelance creative professional. To grow your client list and win more projects, now is a good time to learn strategies to advance.
Practice Your Selling Behaviors
How often do you set aside time to practice developing new skills or behaviors? We’ve all had experiences for devoting time to practice in learning to play a sport, learning to play an instrument or using repetition to perfect a hand-drawn lettering style. When was the last time you were deliberate in your pursuit to strengthen and improve your business skills like selling?
Let’s explore a practice mindset and selling behaviors that can help you improve sales of your creative services. What’s behind your dislike for selling? Do you fear rejection and dread hearing the word no to your sales offer? What can you learn from these selling experiences? What if you approached each sales encounter as a practice session to learn and improve your selling skills?
Sales Objections Provide Clues
Perhaps, no means it’s not the right time for the organization to accept the offer. Perhaps, no means it’s not the right fit for solving a problem. Maybe no represents a budgeting issue. Objections like these provide clues to making changes to your offer and working with these businesses in the future.
Getting to Yes
Presenting a sales offer is not an all or nothing event. As you gather information from your prospective clients and learn more about their business, you can revise your offer to more closely match their needs and desires. You can make more than one sales attempt to get in the door and build a relationship. And the next time you make a sales offer it may result in a yes.
Selling Strategies for Creative Solopreneurs
There are three strategies you can implement to generate more projects and win new clients for your design or illustration studio:
- Upselling
- Referral-based selling
- Prospecting in a niche market
Upselling strategies offer a win-win scenario for you and your clients. Each project you take on deepens your understanding of your clients’ businesses and their goals. The more deeply you understand your clients’ growth objectives, the more value you can provide to solve problems related to branding, digital marketing, content marketing, sales promotions, etc. Once you finish a project, are you in the habit of proposing another that will add value for the business you serve? For example, if you complete a web redesign project what’s the next logical step to drive business? What might you propose next to drive traffic and deeper engagement?
Referral selling can open doors to new design projects and business relationships. Consider the value of the trust you have earned for helping a client solve a business problem. Perhaps your work exceeded expectations and produced demonstrable results (brand awareness, higher traffic and conversions, sales, etc.) that they’ve raved about. What’s next? One move is to collect client testimonials or write up case studies that enhance your credibility and reputation. Second, inform clients you are actively seeking new projects and ask if they’d be willing to make introductions on your behalf into their professional networks.
Prospecting for sales and new business is easier to manage when you focus your efforts on a promoting and offering your creatives services to solve problems in a specific market niche. Businesses owners, marketing executives, and creative directors are interested in hiring freelance creative professionals with deep expertise to supplement their in-house staff or deliver on a marketing strategy to drive business.
Maximize Your Time for Selling
When you’re a freelance creative your time is one of your most valuable resources. You want to aim your marketing and selling efforts for winning new business at a niche audience who want your specialized expertise and skills. Sell to prospective clients who are interested in what you in particular have to offer. When you’re selling to a niche it’s important to emphasize your domain knowledge, experience, and unique skills.