Why is selling difficult? An element in winning a sale is persuading a potential client that you are the best creative hire and optimal fit for a job or project. The act of selling puts your design studio and you on a stage.
Some creatives enjoy being in the spotlight and find it energizing. But, what about the ones who don’t? Those who feel anxiety or hesitance to be in this position even if it is necessary to sell to win clients. While you seek to secure new client relationships and earn trust in your creative business, you are also vulnerable and subject to rejection.
Will the business you’re pursuing say yes or no to working with you? If the answer is yes, it’s time to celebrate. If the answer is no, it’s time to evaluate what you learned from the experience and then move on to winning the next opportunity.
Think Upswing offers these helpful selling tips for solopreneurs to gain more confidence to sell their creative services.
Improve Your Mindset to Sell
What’s your attitude for promoting and selling your creatives services? It’s helpful to think about selling in relation to serving people. When I conduct sales outreach, I’m seeking to align my expertise in strategy with business owners’ needs to improve their marketing to win clients. I approach selling with curiosity to consider who needs my help?
Another context for viewing the art of selling is to assume the role of a story collector. When you meet with a potential client, your first job is to ask them to tell their story. Your second job is to listen. What do they want to accomplish? What’s standing in their way? Can they name their challenges or problems preventing success? Your third job is to try to put yourself in the prospect’s shoes. Can you empathize with the business owner?
Start with developing an understanding before you start selling a solution.
If you’re feeling hesitant about prospecting for sales, it’s time to give yourself a pep talk. When you decided to become an entrepreneurial creative, you possessed confidence in your creative skills and a drive to be your own boss. Tap into that feeling of self-assurance, optimism and sense of agency to create opportunities and make things happen. Call upon your inner creative confidence every time you write an email pitch or make a sales call.
Move from a State of Inertia to Active Selling
Sometimes the hardest part of selling is just getting started. You might be overwhelmed by considering how to tackle strategic selling in manageable steps and with a sharp focus to start seeing results. Here are some things you can do to move from a state of inaction into can’t stop me now action. Begin by making a plan to follow and measure your progress.
Strategic Moves
- Do you have a market niche to target?
- Do you have list of prospects to research and contact?
- What decision maker has the authority and budget to buy from you?
- How will you reach the decision makers you need to influence and connect with?
- Do you have a marketing and sales strategy to convey the value you offer and support your business development efforts?
Tactical Moves
- Review your calendar and block out time for building your network and selling each week. Even the most time-pressed creative solopreneur can find a couple of hours a week for business development.
- Choose a time of the day when you can focus and bring peak energy to interact and listen to the needs of your prospective clients.
- Selling on a consistent basis each week will help you establish relationships over time and develop a pipeline for winning future creative projects.
Establish a selling routine or habit you can rely upon. Once you develop a habit for selling, you don’t have to think about it or feel anxious. Instead, it can become an automatic behavior that yields positive results for your creative business. And once you have the habit in place, you’ll protect it and resist breaking it.
Persistence and Patience
In a connected world, it can be frustrating to reach out to a potential client and not get a response. You might feel dejected. You might feel all your time and effort was wasted. But, was it? As you develop your acumen for selling, you learn best practices and improve your productivity. You’ll learn which strategies and tactics suit your personality as well as produce results like adding clients to your roster or winning additional projects from existing clients.
Patience is part of the formula to master the art of selling your creative services.
Further, it pays to be persistent with your sales outreach efforts. Many creative solopreneurs worry about being perceived as pests when contacting potential clients. But the truth is people are busy and standards are changing for how quickly phone calls are returned or emails are answered. It used to be same day follow up. Next it was follow-up by the close of the next business day. No matter what the prevailing standard is now, please do not be deterred by silence.
Sales professionals simply do not give up on prospecting if there is no initial response. During an outreach cycle they’ll make multiple attempts to connect via email and phone. And if there is still no response, they’ll make a note in their CRM to follow up again in a few months time.
Businesses go through cycles and often change priorities due to competitive and market pressures. You can’t always predict the timing for when a sale will be won. So it pays to invest in the hard work of building the relationships and brand awareness before your prospect is ready for you. And when the ready day comes, they will remember you.
Intentional Selling
You’re the head of sales for your creative business. You get to choose how you handle selling your creative services. First, determine how frequently you should try to connect with prospects: once or twice a week? Secondly, show your genuine interest by personalizing your business communications, emails and phone messages with relevant tidbits from your research on websites and platforms like LinkedIn. This extra step to personalize your sales approach will help to strengthen your credibility and engage their interest.
Remember, selling is a skill that can be improved like any other with practice and intention. In time you may even come to regard it with more enthusiasm and expectation for the possibilities it represents to grow your own creative business. Mastering the art of selling as an entrepreneurial creative can be within your reach using a strategic mindset, patience and persistence.