The first year my business partner and I ran our web design agency was the most profitable year we had, and we let it go to our heads.

After a few years we found ourselves in debt, making razor thin profit margins, at best, on nearly every project. By then all we could do was keep our heads above water to keep from drowning.

Something had to change, and for us that meant selling off our agency and focusing on Proposify. Now that things are going well again, I actively work to make sure we don’t make the same mistake twice.

The recent sale of Yahoo is what got me thinking about this. Before the dot-com bubble broke, they were on top of the world, but then steadily declined for 16 straight years. Yahoo was outsmarted, out-designed, out-engineered, and out-competed in every possible way by better companies, and in the end, sold for parts, like a 1998 Ford Fiesta.

Quincy Larson wrote an excellent post on Medium called The rise and fall (OK — mostly fall) of Yahoo. In it, he lays out major business mistakes Yahoo made and the details behind them, like Yahoo giving up their shares in Alibaba (now worth more than $200 billion) and rejecting Google when the founders tried to sell to Yahoo for $1M.

You probably aren’t running a business even a fraction the size of Yahoo, but there are things we can learn from their mistakes. I’m going to share Larson’s lessons from Yahoo’s failure and apply it to smaller businesses.

1. “Don’t confuse being in right place at the right time with being smart”

When I started Headspace, web design as an agency business was still relatively unique. Most local agencies were adept at branding, advertising, and other “offline” marketing, while others cited websites on their list of services, but few firms in our region were focusing on ‘just’ designing for screens.

This gave us a big leg up early on, because clients who wanted the best web experiences for their users weren’t going to hire a print design company to design their websites, so we won a lot of business.

A few years later however, the small city I live in was flooded with other small web design firms. Being good just wasn’t enough anymore, there were lots of good shops.

We should have had the foresight to specialize our services, build a stronger culture, and frankly, do a lot of things better. Thankfully we did work on internal products which resulted in Proposify, but it was a long, hard road.

On a larger scale, Yahoo fell into the same trap. Because money came easy to them early on, that was all they cared about so they missed longer plays for bigger opportunities (case in point: what Google became).

Timing plays a big role in business, and being in the right market at the right time is essential to starting a successful business. But foundationally you need more than that if you want your business to thrive long term.

You need to:

• Work to understand your unique value proposition, and how to communicate it for lead generation.
• Never stop reading and learning from others.
• Have a big picture vision of where you want to be, and all the smaller goals in between.
• Employ lazy leadership by thinking of your business as a machine you need to build.
• Work on building a strong culture, even in the early days.

2.“Don’t forget what it was that got you to where you are today”

Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Answers, and Flickr were once the go-to places for free email, Q&A ,and photo sharing. They had years on Google, Quora, and Instagram, all who ended up respectively beat them at their own game.

They had ample resources but didn’t learn from users,or iterate and improve on their products, so thus, they quickly became obsolete.

It’s easy to get shiny-ball syndrome as an entrepreneur, looking to change your offering prematurely, or move to greener pastures. It’s even harder to double down on what’s working and improve it so competitors don’t come along and eat your lunch.

The best way to avoid this mistake it to focus on your customers. I know it sounds cliché, but taking the time every week to talk to your customers and learn how and why they use your product/services will keep you grounded in reality.

Even though it took Proposify 18 months to hit product-market fit, we didn’t get there by switching gears. We knew we were onto a product that solved a pain for a particular market, and focused on it until what we built was useful and worth paying for.

Even now, that same audience—web and marketing agencies—still make up the bulk of our customers, despite us dabbling in other industries (as you can see in our template gallery).

3.“Don’t slaughter your golden geese while they are still producing eggs”

Yahoo once owned 40% of Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce site, now valued at over $200 billion, but they sold off most of their shares before it reached that level. Some estimate that sale lost Yahoo about $50 billion.

As a small business owner you may not have any other investments than your business itself. But even then it can be tempting to overspend when you have cash on hand, overpaying yourself to afford fancy things and exotic vacations.

Of course, you need to reward yourself for your hard work and risk, but you also don’t want to bleed your company of necessary capital it may need during sales lulls, or forgo opportunities to expand and reinvest the profits.

It can also be tempting to overhire while there’s cash in the bank instead of hiring slowly and carefully to make sure your team isn’t bloated and underutilized.

4.“Don’t fall for people who are professional professionals”

Yahoo hired Scott Thompson as their first CEO, then Terry Semel, then Marissa Mayer, all of whom made massive blunders during their tenure, despite being career CEOs.

It’s easy to look at the rare first-time founders who succeed on an incredible scale like Mark Zuckerburg, Evan Spiegel, and (1980s) Steve Jobs to assume that novice founders have better odds of success.

The truth lies somewhere in between.

Back in the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs convinced John Sculley, a bigwig at Pepsi, to come lead Apple. That debacle, which resulted in Jobs being ousted and a steady decline of Apple stock, is told in detail in the Steve Jobs biography.

What is the lesson here for us?

Founders get pressured by investors to splurge on hiring a big-name VP Sales or CMO from Silicon Valley thinking that’s the most surefire way to guarantee success. And some founders fall for it.

In many cases, they haven’t yet reached product-market fit by understanding their customers. Instead they’re looking for an easy shortcut to success so they don’t have to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work.

In most cases, promoting from within is your best bet.

They may not have the experience as a manager but they’ve been there with you since the early days, and you’ve nurtured and challenged them along the way.

Someone from your own team who’s fresh from the frontlines will probably make for a better leader than someone who comes with a high price tag but has been out of the trenches too long. They may have blind spots that impel them to follow their business-as-usual playbook instead of innovating.

5.“Don’t let your assumptions blind you to new opportunities”

Yahoo turned down buying Google for $1M because they were afraid Google’s powerful search function would hurt their banner ad business. They were worried that Google would steer people away from Yahoo.

This kind of myopic protectionism kept Yahoo from seeing the incredible potential of owning Google’s better technology rather than competing with it. Apparently no one at Yahoo ever heard the saying, “If you can’t beat’em, join’em”.

They bafflingly missed seeing how having access to Google’s tools could be of benefit to their users. The thing is, when it comes right down to it, users are all that really matter.

Assumptions, and pride, can be (and have been) the downfall of any successful business. You always have to be looking at the broader picture of what’s best for your customers — what they want, what they need — and then figure out how to give that to them, in a profitable way, of course.

That may mean changing your business model, it may mean changing everything about your business. It may mean buying or selling. But if you want to stay in business and continue to flourish, you have to keep both eyes, and your mind, wide open.

Make sure your business doesn’t go from Yahoo to boohoo

Maybe you’re running a SaaS, e-commerce, or service business. Hopefully things are going well and you’re profitable.

Of course you want to keep doubling down on what’s working, keep learning from your customers, growing your team, and improving your core offering. That’s smart and healthy.

But you need to keep looking for new opportunities to grow and expand, whether that’s by investing in your existing company, or a new venture.

You need to make sure your assumptions about what’s working are backed up by hard data.

Take the time to read, learn, and reflect every day, and keep an open mind for what comes next. Your current business could be in just the right place at just the right time, but there’s maybe another product, service, or market you can pivot to in the future.

There are no easy answers or shortcuts to success, but employing this framework of thinking will ensure your business stands the test of time.

SPOILER ALERT - This post may contain spoilers about Stranger Things if you haven’t finished the entire season. So get binging and I’ll meet you back here.

Full disclosure: The 80’s were my time, the cast of every Steven Spielberg /John Hughes/Rob Reiner movie were my people. The music, the hair, the clothes, the food, the bikes. I lived it in real-time, un-ironically.

Case in point: the doomed BFF character, Barb from Stranger Things, setting of 1983:

And this is me in real-life, 1983:

I wasn’t kidding when I said the 80’s were my time, my people. I’m just glad I stayed clear of Steve’s pool.

So not surprisingly, I loved Netflix’s fantastic new summer-perfect series, Stranger Things, set in 1983 Middle America. While there were a lot of things I thought the creators got really right about the making of this series from a viewer perspective, I couldn't help but think about some of the takeaways from a business perspective.

Maybe I’m trying to justify my binge watching by turning it into a clickbait, work-related blog post. But there are aspects of the show that resonated with me in terms of managing a business, creating ideas, and marketing it all back to the people.

Make an emotional connection

If you’re in marketing or sales, you already know that you need to make an emotional connection with your audience, regardless of what you’re selling. It’s like the golden rule. The stronger, the better. Emotion is what moves people to buy, sell, change their behaviour, and do what you want them to do.

There are always skeptics that say, “Well, I didn’t buy my bathroom cleaner based on emotion.”

Yes, you did.

You bought it because the spokeswoman reminded you of your beloved grannie so you trusted that when she said in the ad, “This will take the stank out of your sink,” it was true.

Or maybe little baby ducks always made you go ‘awwwwwwww’ so you liked that cleaner’s packaging. But the bleachy smell of another particular cleaner reminded you of that university summer job as a chambermaid. Not a pleasant memory so there’s no way you’d choose THAT product.

We are emotional drama queens all day long, even if we’re not conscious of it.

And that’s where Stranger Things starts things off on just the right note. It uses nostalgia marketing as its secret weapon.

I really knew nothing about Stranger Things before I watched it, other than it was rumoured to be very authentically set in the 80’s. My people, my time. Just that tidbit alone was enough to pique my interest.

Then I heard there were a lot of influences from, and nods to, classic 80’s movies like E.T., Stand By Me, Poltergeist, The Goonies, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The movies of my time as a teenager when I didn’t just watch a movie, I consumed it, I felt it.

That’s about all I knew when I decided to get over my guilt of sitting inside on a beautiful summer night to start binge watching Stranger Things.

It’s also why on any given night in the past month the streets are swarming with people bumping into telephone poles. Pokémon GO is another brilliant example of nostalgia marketing.

But using that example, Pokémon GO is not part of my nostalgia. I was well into my 20’s when Pokémon came out the first time and I was off chasing boys and bears in the wilds of Canada’s Yukon (you should go, BTW), not playing with a Game Boy. So I haven’t been as ‘touched’ by the current resurgence of Pokémon’s popularity as my younger co-workers who are all reliving their childhood fun.

Different generations have different feelings about same events or cultural symbols and even within demographic groups there can be a lot of variation.

With nostalgia marketing, you need to be very clear who you’re marketing to, and how you want them to feel in association with your brand.

And just because someone didn't actually live through a particular generational event, they can still have an emotional nostalgic relationship with aspects of that time.

Think of fan-obsessed shows like Mad Men or Downton Abbey. A small percentage of the viewers of those shows would have actually experienced those times and situations (even less so in the case of Downton Abbey) but most people felt a connection based on their perception of what those times were like.

With nostalgia marketing, you usually you want to focus on happy, more idealistic times in your target audience’s past - or at least what they perceive were happier times.

Maybe Don Draper explained nostalgia marketing the best during the Kodak ‘Carousel’ pitch:

“Technology is a glittering lure. But there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.”

Be authentic

If you’ve watched Stranger Things, you know about the set design. Your mind has been blown by the set design. Authenticity is a critical part of getting nostalgia just right.

It doesn’t look like someone is trying to recreate the 80’s in a goofy Halloween costume kind of way; it actually feels like the 80’s. The phones, the hair, the clothes, the houses, the cars, the music, the decor. It IS the 80’s, not a parody of.

I heard an interview on CBC Radio’s Day 6 with the prop master from Stranger Things, Lynda Reiss. Reiss talks about the crew’s commitment to authenticity and how props played a powerful role in achieving that.

Like the Dungeons & Dragons figurines the boys play with throughout the series:

"I didn't want to put plastic and have it painted. Even as far as sound goes, when the boys clunk those characters down on the board, there is a different noise a lead character makes than a plastic character." - Lynda Reiss

This level of authenticity helps deepen the emotional connection viewers have with Stranger Things. It evokes feelings of respect and admiration for the show’s creators for committing to this level of authenticity and for treating the viewers’ memories with such care and attention to detail.

Everyone talks about the importance of being authentic, but what does that mean for your business?

Being authentic in business is about doing what you promise, whether that’s in relation to your customers, your employees, your product /service, or your community.

It’s about defining your mission and goals, your brand, in a way that will connect with all your stakeholder groups, and in a way that you know you can follow through on.

Rustin Hanks, the CEO of TapInfluence says authenticity works for businesses because:

• It elevates your business above the competition
• It builds your identity and image into something influential
• It gives substance to your business, services, and products
• It enables people to relate to your business
• It helps people understand how what you offer is of benefit to them
• It tells people that what you offer is of high quality
• It marks you out as a reliable, trustworthy company
• It encourages engagement and can turn audiences into advocates

The key to authenticity isn’t just being real, it’s being consistent.

As Seth Godin puts it:

“If it acts like a duck (all the time), it's a duck. Doesn't matter if the duck thinks it's a dog, it's still a duck as far as the rest of us are concerned.”

If Linda Reiss had spent all that time sourcing just the right metal Dungeons & Dragons pieces but then had Steve and Nancy making out to a song released in 1988, instead of 1983 when the show is set, it would have annoyed viewers like me who know the difference. We would have lost trust in the show’s authenticity and as a result, weakened our emotional connection with it.

So if one of your company values is about committing to environmental sustainability but the manufacturing of your product is contributing to the poisoning of local wetlands, you’ve got an authenticity problem. We did a great podcast interview with Organik SEO about this very topic.

If you say on your website you’re committed to customer service but don’t train, empower, or invest in your customer support team, you’ve got an authenticity problem.

Do what you say you’re going to do. Consistently.

Be who you say you are. Consistently.

Remember:

Sometimes, we all need the Upside Down

OK, so maybe your business doesn’t need the terrifying, goopy, evil, dark, monster-ridden alternate reality that is the Upside Down of Stranger Things.

But what you do need, what we all need sometimes, is a different perspective.

I loved that the Upside Down wasn’t a different place, like a far away planet or an evil lair. Instead, it was exactly the same place, just a different version of itself. The Hawkins woods, Will’s fort, Joyce’s house, the bathroom.

Creepy evil stuff aside, it made me think about the importance of looking at a situation from another angle, or using a different lens.

It can be easy to get caught up in seeing things the same way all the time; how you approach problems, ideas, business opportunities. It can be stagnating, frustrating, and detrimental to business growth.

And yes, there are times when the old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” may be true, but something doesn’t have to be broken to make it BETTER.

So how do you get that new perspective on something you look at every day, like your company, your product, your sales process, your team?

Get outside inspiration

Although businesses vary from industry to industry, they often share the same kinds of challenges, and in turn, solutions. Expose yourself to industries different than your own, in other countries, and to people using a different model. You may discover a solution you hadn’t considered.

My version of this is often my husband. At first blush, we had very different careers. Me in marketing, he in the Canadian military, and a good chunk of his military career was in intelligence.

When we first started dating and I would tell him about what I was doing at work - developing messages for a client, trying to find the right tone, trying to convince or influence behaviour, creating key messages - he surprisingly could relate.

Some of his team’s intelligence work involved developing messages that would resonate with people in other countries and cultures; to earn their trust, gain their confidence, to win “hearts and minds” as it were. We had different terms for things but we quickly realized how much crossover there was.

And although there were a lot of particular details he could never divulge, it was interesting and helpful to me at times to hear about different general approaches they used and challenges they encountered (for example, how a symbol of a dove on a postcard they developed was supposed to represent peace but the locals mistook it for a chicken and thought NATO was going to hand out free chickens).

Talk to your customers

There’s no better way to escape the ivory tower of your stale perceptions about your business than to talk to your customers.

We do that here at Proposify. Part of our onboarding process after signing up for a paid plan involves asking each of our customers for a 15-minute phone call either with our CEO, Kyle Racki, or our product manager, Ricky Ferris.

Not everyone takes us up on the offer but a number of our customers do, and we are grateful for the frontline feedback. They tell us about their experience with our product and also about their particular business, their challenges, their opportunities.

These conversations allow us to recognize any false assumptions we might have had and help us stay focused on creating a product and service that is actually valuable to our customers.

So don’t leave feedback to just impersonal surveys and the customer support team. Get on the phone, have coffee, fly out to see them. Find out directly what they think, what their business challenges are. It could lead to a new service, redesigned feature, or an improved process.

Ask your team

This seems obvious but it’s amazing how often owners can overlook the rich resources and fresh perspectives right under their noses: their team.

Your employees aren’t there just there to churn out stuff; they’re your team. Meaning, you’re all working together toward the same goal.

If you’re the company founder, it can be an easy habit to get into of trying to do everything yourself because you had to do that in the early days of your company.

But that’s why you now have a team; to help share the load, to bring diverse experience and perspective. So open up discussions, and not to just people in one particular department, ask everyone. You may be surprised by the innovative approaches that rise to the top given a supportive environment.

You don’t have to be big to be mighty

It’s not the CIA, or the cops, or the adults who save the day in Stranger Things. It’s the kids.

Yes, the adults get involved later on but really it’s the kids who figure out there’s something very wrong in Hawkins and are very determined to start putting plans into action.

And then there’s Eleven, a small, young, waifish girl who wields incredibly strong and special powers. But nobody would know by looking at her.

It can be easy when you’ve got a small business or you’re just starting out to feel like you can’t make an impression until you’re bigger, you have more money, more clients, or a larger team.

But sometimes being small means you can be agiler than a large company. You can change direction quickly, you can try new things because you haven’t yet been pigeon-holed, or you can create a new brand because you’re not locked into an old stale and crusty one.

You can experiment and fail because not everyone’s looking at you so it gives you time to learn and gain more experience before you have to perform on the big stage. You can fly under the radar and then take your competition by surprise.

“Your business has to work when it’s small in order to survive to the point where it gets big.” ― Seth Godin

Not the Harvard Business Review

So I’m not suggesting Stranger Things is The Harvard Business Review or Gary Vaynerchuk.

It’s a fun, well-done show but I do think there are keys to its success that can offer real life business lessons to all of us.

And if that helps assuage your guilt for binge watching all eight episodes this weekend, more power to you. I’m just not sure you can claim it as overtime.

Zoom Feature

As of Saturday, August 13th, you can zoom out to see the page as a whole, or zoom in to see that you are in perfect alignment. If you have a small screen, the proposal will automatically be zoomed to a position where you can see the entire width of the proposal at once.

Grid and Ruler Update

What would a zoom feature be without a solid grid and ruler to further guide you to perfection? Our new grid is based on 5 pixel increments and the ruler now overlaps the page so you can truly see things line up.

Wait, there’s more!

Another small addition to Proposify is the ability to filter your business and view metrics by client. This will help you better understand how each client reads your proposals so you can narrow in, and close the deal.

Top Secret News!

It may seem like we’ve been quiet for the last couple months, but it’s not because we’ve been  just sitting back and enjoying the summer. In fact, we have been locked away in the Proposify lab brewing up some really exciting updates and features that we’ll be be releasing in the coming months.

Stay tuned as we start to leave a trail of hints behind...

Live long and Proposify,
Ricky Ferris
Proposify Product Manager

It may come as a shock to some people, especially to those who work alongside me at Proposify, but when I first joined the company just two years ago I was brought on to be a full stack developer.

Yet when I started, I was immediately struck by one obvious truth: Proposify’s GIF game was weak. It was an absolute disaster.

There were myriad issues: low frame rates, washed-out or over-dithered colour palettes, and even the odd cinemagraph that would be trotted out as if it were actually a fully-fledged GIF.

I challenged Proposify’s co-founders, Kevin, Kyle, and our CTO, Jonathan, with this question: How can we possibly compete on a global scale when we were clearly using one-horse-town GIFs?

I knew then and there that Proposify needed me for more than just development. I needed to bring forth a new standard - nay, a new era - of giffery.

Now, you don’t need an MGP (Master of GIF Posting) to be a successful CGO. Even someone completely self-taught can turn a struggling company around with the right attitude. All it really takes is recognizing that there is a problem and caring enough to fix it.

How to identify a failing business

Bad GIFs.

Maybe their GIFs were just a paragraph of text superimposed over someone who wasn’t even talking.

Maybe their GIFs had low frame rates.

Or maybe it should have just remained a jpeg.

Maybe their GIFs had a person mouthing a single word of the caption:

When everything comes together to make a terrible GIF, you get something like this. If you’re not going to include the person mouthing the whole caption, then it either shouldn’t be a GIF or it shouldn’t have a caption.

And so, in the summer of 2014, I assumed the thankless role of Chief GIF Officer. I was able to identify what needed to be fixed and acted upon those needs with ruthless efficiency.

Now, after two arduous years of helping the company grow, when I walk into the office each morning I can tell that I’ve earned the respect and adoration of my colleagues.

At last I can say we’re competitive.

What makes a good GIF?

First of all, it’s a hard G as in ‘graphics’, you filthy animals.

Second, some basic and easy-to-follow ground rules:

1. The frame rate of a GIF should be no less than twelve frames per second - precisely half of a standard National Television System Committee (NTSC) television broadcast. This guarantees every GIF is suitably smooth.
2. The GIF should not loop backwards when it’s done playing (i.e. play forwards, then backwards) - that’s what we call the Devil’s Loop.
3. The GIF should be emotive or otherwise pertain to the situation at hand.
4. If a GIF war should emerge between two parties, no third party is to interfere - let the war run its course.
5. One should always seek the highest quality GIF. Try to avoid GIFs with excessive brightness, contrast, or dithering.
6. GIFs are for watching, not for reading! Don’t overuse GIFs as a replacement for the written word.
7. If you’re the CGO at your company, whenever a GIF is posted it is the duty of the CGO to respond in kind with a better GIF.

When I started at this company we had less than twenty customers and each new acquisition was a major event.

We automatically emailed the team every time a new customer converted, and every time that happened we rang a bell. But we didn’t have a real bell yet (you can listen to this podcast about how we finally got one) so we had to ring virtual bells.

Here’s an example of a great GIF for ringing a bell.

And here’s a terrible GIF. Can you spot the problems?

Where’s the joy in this GIF?

It’s supposed to represent a joyous occasion, and yet every time I look at it I’m just depressed. One could make the defense that, based on the context of the GIF, it is funny in an absurd, ironic way (the above GIF is from a particularly tense scene in Breaking Bad).

And yet as I’ve stated before, a GIF should be good without a tongue-in-cheek reference to its context. Initially, my words fell on deaf ears and I had to constantly combat bad bell gifs, dealing with resistance from my colleagues time and time again.

It’s important to always be firm when people need to learn how to be world-class:

But sometimes, like the time our CTO, Jonathan, learned he could just link to GIFs instead of downloading and then uploading them to Slack, the results could be worth it:

What makes a good CGO?

Being a CGO isn’t always filled with the awe of your peers. Sometimes, a good CGO needs to know when to truly put their foot down.

As Michael DeLuise did to Sean Astin in the great masterpiece of the 90’s, Encino Man, sometimes you just have to shut them down.

Here’s an example of when I had to put my foot down and lay down the law:

Just a year ago, Kyle ceremoniously enabled a Giphy integration for Slack.

It was hailed as the dawn of a new era in giffing, one in which the exchange of GIFs could be performed freely without the watchful eye of Proposify’s own CGO.

How did this integration work?

It was as simple as typing “/giphy” and then a keyword. For instance, “/giphy memory” would do a search for gifs that were tagged with the word “memory”.

The company was still small at the time (just five employees total) and I was able to keep the lid shut on the Giphy integration. Managing the GIF trade was easy when there were so few people, but now that we’ve become a company of 12, regulation has become ever more necessary.

And yet, in a moment of weakness that to this day still haunts me, the lid came off and the Giphy integration was unleashed upon the masses, leading to some horrifying misuses of the medium.

For instance, there was the time Geoff, the youngest member of our team, wanted to call us his friends and in his youthful naiveté decided to use the completely uncurated powers of Giphy:

Or maybe the GIFs just made no sense whatsoever and the conversation took a downward spiral into a meta-discussion on what the GIF meant.

In some instances, team members would intentionally abuse the system to just see what sorts of things Giphy would find. It was up to me to show them the error of their ways.

Altogether, the sudden influx of GIFs made actual, meaningful discussion in Slack grind to a halt. It was after almost two full days of this madness being unleashed upon our Slack channel and my continued efforts for Giphy teetotalism that people began to understand why the position of CGO is so necessary.

After an impassioned defense of continued regulation in the GIF economy, at last the Giphy integration was disabled and sanity once more returned to Proposify’s Slack channel.

Order was not the only thing to come to Slack, but I dare say, a whole new appreciation for the art of GIFs.

Out of the ashes of the corpse of Giphy rose as a phoenix a GIF renaissance. With chaos firmly behind us, Proposify employees finally understood what made for a good gif, and were able to even hold a conversation with GIFs as the primary means of communication.

The importance of keeping things fun

Now that you know what it takes to be a good CGO and you’ve established a baseline of quality in your organization, it’s time to relax.

As a wise princess once said, “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers,” and this is true a thousand-fold for GIFs.

You’ve already done all of the legwork - now is the time to just sit back and watch your colleagues express themselves like never before.

In a developing organization, there’s often a marked shift in the requirements of the CGO. You stop being the enforcer and transform into the chaperone.

It’s like a middle school dance - the children can mostly take care of themselves so your job is to make sure things don’t get too unruly.

Or, perhaps, the kids won’t mingle and the dance gets a little stale. Then it’s your job, like any good chaperone, to mix things up and bring GIFs to the forefront.

Sometimes all it takes is saying, “It’s time for Chris Farley GIFs.”

So your GIFs are strong and your company is a success - now what?

Conclusion

Bad GIFs are a distraction and nuisance at best and, at worst, actively hinder productivity by increasing the noise in chat channels that could otherwise be used for discussion.

What is your company doing to combat the tyranny of the bad GIF? Have you brought a CGO aboard yet?

What’s your favourite GIF?

Partnerships have been on my mind a lot lately.

I recently wrote a blog post about how SaaS companies and agencies make for great partners, which I won’t rehash.

Shortly after I wrote that post, I connected with Mac King, who heads up the Shopify Plus Expert program. We invited him on our Agencies Drinking Beer podcast to chat, which you can check out here.

I’ve been seeing how companies like Hubspot, Shopify and InfusionSoft have benefitted from having a partner program, and how it improves the businesses of everyone involved: the SaaS companies, the partners, and most importantly, the customers.

A win-win scenario for everyone

We’re fortunate to have a passionate customer base. We receive tweets and emails on a daily basis from customers telling us they love our product and how it’s helped them in some way to close deals or improve their sales process.

@proposify we have been using the product for nearly 2 years @cashfullstop and love it. Keep up the great work.
— Keiren Murphy (@KeirenMurphy) August 22, 2016

Often these same people ask us if we offer a reseller account so they can make a commission from customers they introduce to Proposify.

For the longest time I hadn’t been interested in that. We’ve been growing pretty quickly on our own without needing to pay resellers or add the work of managing a partner program to our already full plates.

But then we began to think about how it could improve our customers’ lives and reconsidered the benefits of a partnership program.

What customers need

We’ve found that many of our customers, especially ones who aren’t very tech or marketing savvy, need more assistance to maximize all the benefits of Proposify than our little 13-person team can provide:

• They need help moving their existing proposals into Proposify. We already offer this as a paid service and are overwhelmed with the level of demand for it.
• They need someone to help them write and/or design a custom-made proposal template. We don’t offer this service at all.
• They need someone to guide them and provide training or consulting on how to get the most out of the product. We can offer some larger customers a bit more training, but in general it overwhelms our support staff who need to balance one-on-one phone calls with helping out the rest of the customer base through email and live chat.
• We will be launching a public API (more on that soon) and we anticipate companies will want help integrating their existing software with Proposify. We don’t plan to ever build bespoke integrations for individual companies. Instead, we’ll continue to build on our integrations with other popular SaaS products that our customers find useful.

So as you can see, the demand is there but the supply is not. And frankly, we aren’t in the service business and don’t want to be. We want to stick with what we do well.

That’s where you come in.

A lot of our customers ARE in the service business and would welcome more client work coming their way.

If this is you, here’s where our partner program could be of benefit. Being a partner will enable you to:

• Earn recurring, passive income. ‘Nuff said.
• Provide more value to your clients by solving the pain of managing their own sales/proposal process.
• Offer paid services on top of the product, like custom proposal design, proposal writing, API development, training, or consulting work.
• Receive more leads to your door. We will promote our partners to new leads and existing customers. We average about 100 signups per day.
• Sell proposal templates on a marketplace. This won’t be available right away, but it’s something we’re interested in developing, where you can design a template once, and sell it multiple times.

In time, we also want to offer some cool bonuses to partners, like exclusive content, guest-content opportunities, and early-bird access to new features.

Sound interesting? Good! Let’s move on:

How the partner program will work

I need to preface this: We are still in the early stages of this program. I’m not pretending to have this all figured out, and it’s important to talk to the partners to get their feedback. If things need to change, they’ll change.

Here are the basic steps of becoming a partner:

1. You will need to apply to become a partner and fill out a form. Apply here. We won’t accept everyone as a partner automatically just because they apply. We’re looking for quality over quantity. We know you respect that.
2. If accepted, we’ll contact you, you’ll need to sign off on our partnership agreement and pay an annual fee to move forward.
3. You’ll need to complete a course to get certified. If anyone else on your team wants to get certified they’ll need to take the course too. It’s critical all of our partners fully understand how Proposify works and can teach it to their clients.

Does this sound like a big commitment? Maybe it is, and that’s because we want committed partners. But we also want to reward those who invest their time and money by delivering leads to their site and helping grow their business.

Commission

The million-dollar question: What’s the payout structure?

Our goal is not just to acquire new customers, but retain them. Selling a customer on a $100/mo plan only to have them cancel after 30 days isn’t what we’re going for.

So we want to reward our partners for bringing in quality customers that stick around and grow with the software over time with a 20% commission.

For example, if you bring in a new customer who pays $50/mo you’ll receive a 20% commission on that. $10/mo isn’t a lot of money. But bring in 10 customers paying the same amount and that becomes $100 in your pocket every month for the whole lifecycle of the customer, without you needing to do anything.

Of course we also sell larger plans too, and if the customer upgrades, you receive the commission on that.

Imagine after a year or two of bringing in dozens of customers who stick around and you could be generating thousands of US dollars per month in recurring, passive income. Not to mention earning additional revenue through other value-add services that you charge to the client directly.

Who should apply?

Ideally we’re looking for freelancers, independent consultants, and small agencies as partners, especially ones with expertise in design, development, and writing, who can also train clients on how to use Proposify.

Next steps for us

We need to build the actual partner program into the product, which we’re working on now.

It will let you invite customers to start a trial, and you’ll be able to associate customer accounts you may have already brought in before the program.

We need to be able to track all of this properly, auto-calculate commissions, and make it easy for you to request permission to hop into the accounts of your clients.

We also need to build the public marketplace so we can start driving some leads your way.

We’re going to officially launch the pilot partner program by September 1st (a week from this posting), but we won’t have any of the in-app stuff built yet. It’s going to just be an agreement between us, and we’re going to manually verify customers you bring in.

We’ll keep everyone updated as we continue to roll out the program and build in more automation.

For those who are accepted as a partner, I’ll send out an email inviting you to a live webinar with me on September 1st so I can offer more detail on the program, show you some cool secret features our product team has cooking, and hear your questions and feedback.

Whaddaya say, partner? Click here to apply for the partnership program.

Hope to do business with you soon :)

It’s been 24 years since the beginning of September meant back to school for me, but I still get the urge to buy a pencil case and a new notebook every time Labour Day rolls around.

Actually, September usually feels more like the new year to me than January 1st does. I often do more planning and strategic thinking about both my personal and professional lives in September than I do in January.

In the fall I feel an aura of excitement and optimism about the months ahead, as opposed to January when it feels like there are more negative reasons for needing to re-evaluate. (This may also have to do with the weather where I live in Atlantic Canada - September is glorious, while January is gorey)

If you live in the northern hemisphere, you’re coming off what can be the lazy, hazy days of summer. For most businesses, things moved at a slower pace. With both clients and your team members in and out of the office on various vacations and national holidays, deals probably didn’t close as fast, work didn’t get done as quickly, and major decisions were put off.

So now with a fresh, shiny September upon us, it’s time to kick-start a new season of business growth.

Here are a few suggestions on how you can transition from the beach back to the boardroom for a successful fall (but I still support keeping that flip flop spirit alive in your heart).

1. Focus on the positive

Whether you’re a business owner or a member of a team, from time to time you can start feeling stale about your job and what you’re doing.

Remind yourself why you started the business, or came to work there in the first place. What you wanted to accomplish, what you wanted to build, how you wanted to grow as a person or an entrepreneur.

Think of all the things you love about what you do - selling, interacting with clients, solving problems, innovating, being creative, working with your team - and then figure out how you can do more of that.

Let these positive feelings fuel your activities for the next quarter and use them to inspire positivity among your team.

2. Focus on the negative

I’m a very positive person but I think there’s real value in examining the ‘negative’, or put a better way, thinking critically.

It bums us out if we receive a bad review of Proposify, but I think that information is invaluable to the development of the product. How else will we know how to make it better? How else will we slow our churn rate if we don’t know where the problem lies?

So in the same way you should examine all the things you love about your business, it’s important to think about what you don’t like. What isn’t working? What’s making you unhappy and maybe holding you, your business, or your team, back?

Is it a process that needs to be tweaked? Do you need to hire someone to take on something you don’t like so you can concentrate on what you’re best at? Do you need to fire that one bad apple on your team that’s bringing everyone and everything down?

Look at what’s NOT good about your situation and then figure out what needs to happen to change it.

3. Focus on your financials

Hopefully you’re already on top of what’s happening with your bottom line but it never hurts to revisit your financial goals versus your current status.

September marks the first month of the final quarter of the year so it’s a good time to reevaluate your projections, examine your expenses, and make a plan for how to make this quarter count.

But don’t stop there.The fall is also the time to start planning your financial goals for the next year, looking at what you need to do to get where you want to be. Will you require outside investment? Where will that come from? You need to start preparing and pitching for that now.

4. Give your team a pep talk

Just like your principal started the school year with an assembly, you should hold one with your team. There’s likely not been a week this summer that everyone’s been in the office at the same time so this is a good opportunity to bring people back together and remind them of the game plan ahead.

I like when it happens right after Labour Day but choose the earliest date possible when your whole team will be present and able to meet.

Make sure the tone is positive and motivational. Remind everyone of the great things you’ve accomplished as a team, and get them focused and excited about the goals for the future, both immediate and long term.

Encourage participation - have each department to give an update on what they’ve been up to and what they’ll be working on in the coming months.

This can help those people dragging their heels off vacation feel reinvigorated, and it can be a subtle reminder that it’s time to get down to work and get shit done.

5. Meet with each department

Even you have a small company, each person on your team has different objectives, approaches, challenges, and expectations related to their job.

Chances are you haven’t really connected in the last couple of months so meeting with each department gives you an opportunity to catch up on a micro level and make plans to solve any issues before they get too big (and maybe even share a vacay story or two).

Are they feeling over or under resourced? Is there a skills gap? Maybe they have ideas on how to be more efficient, bring in new clients, or develop a new service.

Taking the time to talk either one-on-one with the department head, or to the whole group keeps you better informed on what’s happening in your business and motivates your team by demonstrating you are engaged and interested.

6. Invest in your business

If your business is going to grow, you need to make an investment. Discover where the needs lie in your company, research what the options are to address the situation, and evaluate the potential return on investment (not to mention what you can afford).

That may be new technology in the office, like a server upgrade. Maybe you invest in an employee by sending them for professional development to gain new skills, or you’re going to finally hire that extra sales rep to help grow new business.

Maybe the investment is in yourself, by getting a mentor or a business coach to help you grow.

There are likely lots of things in your business that could benefit from extra time and money but even if you pick just one to kick off the fall season, you’ll likely reap the results of that investment in the coming year.

7. Reach out and reconnect

I actually find the summer really busy and so do most people I know. My friends with kids are going in twelve directions between summer camps and family trips, every week someone different is out of the office on vacation, there are a multitude of visitors to entertain, and we’re all just trying to squeeze the most out of each fleeting sunny day.

I also have a side hustle renting baby equipment to people travelling to my city and the summer is basically my Christmas season, so juggling that with my full-time gig at Proposify makes this season even more hectic for me.

As much as I love summer, I look forward to the fall when a routine sets back in, everyone’s focused again, and I can reconnect with people.

When I had my freelance business, I would send out a personal email to each of my clients after Labour Day to touch base. I’d ask about their summer, check in to see how things were going, and I’d try to include a few project suggestions to spark a conversation.

Maybe it was something we had talked about doing a few months ago, or maybe it was something new altogether, but the point was to re-engage and remind them I was ready to rock.

Depending on the nature of our relationship and the work we had done together, some clients I would try to have coffee with for a face-to-face, others I would suggest a planning meeting to schedule out new projects for the coming months. And for others, the email was just a gentle, “Hey, remember me?” after a beer-soaked summer.

Reconnecting with your existing clients, any prospects that might have gone lukewarm over the summer, and your network in general is a great way to kick-start new business opportunities for the fall.

Everyone will be back in the saddle and ready to do business so the timing is just right to close some new deals.

8. Find your stress buster

Life is stressful. Work is stressful. Even if you love what you do, there can be some difficult days that take a toll on your spirit. And quadruple that stress level if you’re a business owner.

While you can’t always control what happens to you at work or even your personal life, having a plan for how you deal with stress can prevent the dreaded burnout that can leave you ineffective as a leader and a detriment to your business.

Now’s the time to sign up for that recreational basketball league, pottery class, or roller derby team.

Whatever it is, make sure it has nothing to do with work so you get a chance to clear your head and reset a couple of times a week.

9. Eat...better

Notice I used the word, ‘better’ because I feel like there are so many messages yelling at us about how we eat, bossy messages about what we should and shouldn’t eat. Gluten, sugar, fat, carbs, preservatives with 22-letter names. Ugh. Instead of an all-out war on different kinds of food, why don’t we aim for some incremental improvements? Eating a little better, not necessarily best.

I’m not going to make any judgement about what you may have eaten over the summer but I will tell you I ate enough juicy BBQ hamburgers (with bacon and cheese, natch), hot dogs roasted over a campfire, and Miss Vickie’s potato chips (my weakness) to make a clogged artery sing.

So it’s time to get back on track a bit. And not because of weight, but because of how eating all that stuff makes me feel, especially that during the week when I’m trying to work. Sluggish, cranky, moody, blahhhhhhhhhhhh.

Food is your fuel, you put junk in your tank and it’s not going to perform as well. I know you’re busy - we’re all busy - but find a way to make a least one meal a day a little better, a little more nutritious.

10. Get a good sleep

My mother is such a strong believer in the power of good sleep that back in high school my brother and I would joke that we could hobble into the house with a gushing stab wound and Mum would say, “You need more sleep!”

She was hardcore on set bedtimes and making sure we got an adequate amount of sleep. It drove us crazy when we were teenagers but I totally get it now.

If I don’t get enough sleep, I feel like I’m hungover without the fun party stories to go with it. I can’t function properly, I’m cranky, and I end up eating crap.

I know there’s this whole hustle philosophy around “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”, which to me is right up there in with the absurd competitive game of “I’m the busiest!” We need to sleep to function properly, period. You can cheat your way out of a lot of things but your body’s need for sleep is not one of them.

Aside from my mum, entrepreneurs are also getting behind the sleep revolution, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and The Huffington Post’s co-founder, Arianna Huffington, who wrote a book about it, even going so far to call sleep deprivation the new smoking.

Check out Arianna’s quick TED Talk called “How to succeed? Get more sleep.”

So if you do nothing else on this list as you head “back to school”, at the very least make sure you’re getting a good night’s sleep. It can go a long way in affecting your mental and physical health, two things essential to keep you on your toes, and on top of your business. Don’t make me call my mum on you.

Ryan Deiss, CEO and founder of Digital Marketer, describes a lead magnet as “an irresistible bribe offering a specific chunk of value to a prospect in exchange for their contact information.”

If you run a design, development, or marketing agency you may have recommended a lead magnet to your clients to drive leads into a sales funnel. But very often I come across agency websites whose only call-to-action is “contact us”. Kind of lame, but more importantly, a huge missed opportunity.

Especially since when I talk to digital agency owners they tell me that lead generation is one of their biggest problems, with most relying simply on word-of-mouth and referrals from past clients.

Why should you create a lead magnet?

At the mall food-court near my place there’s a Mediterranean spot called Villa Madina.

Any time I’m walking around trying to decide what to get for lunch, I’m met with a warm smile from the guys running the food stand.

As soon as our eyes meet, one of them holds out a free sample on a skewer, beckoning me to come closer. How can I turn down free chicken souvlaki? Once I taste it I know that’s what I’m having for lunch, and I almost always end up ordering a full meal.

Think of your lead magnet as that free skewer that sucks your prospect in and makes them hungry to buy.

For an agency business, a lead magnet should answer a question for your target customer in a way that naturally leads them to hiring your agency.

People who hire agencies typically work in-house at companies and are tasked with managing projects they have little skill or experience in, such as managing an ad spend, or planning a mobile app.

Before they even think of hiring an agency, many are searching the web looking for resources to help them answer specific questions.

This presents you with a golden opportunity to be the solution to their problems. If you can provide value on a small scale and showcase your agency’s expertise, the natural next step (if you position yourself correctly) is for the lead to contact you for a proposal.

What should your lead magnet be about?

What are your ideal clients looking for help with? What burning problem are they trying to solve?

The easy way to answer this is to think about conversations you have every day. When someone you meet learns what you/your company does, what question do they usually ask you?

Remember, the more specific your services, the better. What do you do better than your competitors? This could be working in an industry segment (vertical) or with a unique skill or software platform (horizontal).

For example, if you’re an app development shop, it’s better to go ultra-specific based on your expertise. Like, how to design hotel bookings on mobile devices rather than to be broad and general, like how to build an app.

OK, so now you know what question you need to answer for your prospect. What format should you choose?

Lead magnet formats

I’m going to brainstorm some lead magnet ideas that are specific to mobile app designers who specialize in working with SaaS startups, and digital agencies who specialize in working with hotels and travel companies.

I’m using these lead magnet examples to get your creative juices flowing. You can then take any of the ideas and put your own unique spin on it, making sure to connect your particular value proposition and your customer personas.

1. Webinars

Webinars are one of the best tools digital agencies can use to establish their authority on a subject, educate their listeners, and field multiple warm prospects simultaneously.

Our imaginary mobile app design company that works with SaaS startups could host a webinar called, “The 3 Questions SaaS Companies Need to Answer Before Planning a Mobile App”.

A title like this ensures that:

1) the people signing up are actually in the early stages of planning their mobile app

2) they are a SaaS company

3) they want to make sure it’s done right.

This naturally filters out prospects who likely aren’t a good client fit, and it enables you to speak directly to the prospects who are at the right stage of the buying cycle.

How to get started

Hosting a webinar is as simple as using YouTube. Google recently retired Hangouts On Air in favour of using YouTube directly.

Go to your YouTube account and click on My Channel > Video Manager

Then click on Live Streaming.

You’ll see that you can add a title and description, start encoding, and you’re live.

From the tech side, it’s about as simple as that! Of course you’ll also need a landing page and funnel to start inviting prospects to your webinar, which we’ll cover more later. Learn more tips on hosting effective webinars.

2. Consultation

A consultation is probably the easiest, most obvious lead magnet you can offer.

A word of caution, though — many people coming to your website will be hesitant to book a free consultation because they expect you’re going to be trying to sell them on your services.

On the other hand, you may get overwhelmed by the volume, offering free consultation to low quality leads that don’t go anywhere.

To avoid either of these problems, introduce scarcity when offering consulting as a lead magnet. Free consults work better as lead magnets when you make them appear like prizes you’re only awarding to a select number of people.

To do this, you need to establish authority first through books, webinars, or public speaking, so I’d only recommend offering a free consultation if you already have a reasonably strong personal brand and a channel that presents you as an authority on a subject.

It may work better to only offer a small number of free 30-minute calls at the end of a webinar, or to have a web form to book the call that filters out bad leads.

3. Audit/analysis

Audits, or analyses, are the more tangible version of a consultation. It’s where you perform research on your lead’s business or website and produce a customized report outlining what they are doing well, and what they can improve. The obvious next step being that they hire your agency to fix or improve what they’re doing wrong.

In most cases, you’ll want to save time by using software tools to pull together information. For example, using Hubspot’s free website grader you can perform a basic site analysis that uncovers how well your lead’s website performs when it comes to SEO, mobile, speed, security, and other factors.

If you’re an SEO agency you could use a tool like Positionly to uncover search data about your lead or their competitors.

If you’re a social media agency, you could use BuzzSumo to find your lead’s most shared content and offer some tips to create content that will outperform their competitors.

Once you have the data you should pull it into a nicely designed PDF report that’s branded to your agency.

Analyses are similar to consultations in that you want to be very selective about who you offer them to so your salespeople aren’t wasting hours performing them for unqualified leads.

The keys points to using analyses as a lead magnet are:

• Make them fast and easy to pull together
• Make them helpful and actionable, but don’t give away the farm
• Make contacting the agency for a proposal the natural next-step

How to get started

Think about what kind of audit or analysis you perform when onboarding a new client for the first time. How can you take a sample of what you do and give away just enough of a taste to intrigue your prospect to want to hire your agency?

Have your designer create a beautifully branded document template to format the reports and be sure to make it as easy as possible to reproduce them.

4. Email course

When someone comes across your website they usually aren’t quite ready to contact you for a project.

Offering a free 5-day email course can be a great way to get their email address and warm them up until they’re ready to take the next step, like a call for a proposal.

While we aren’t an agency, here at Proposify we’ve been using a 5-day email course as a lead magnet for more than a year, and it still drives leads into our funnel that convert.

As you can see, the open rates are quite high (30-60%) and the unsubscribe rate low (0.56%).

If you’re a marketing agency that works with travel and hotel brands, your 5-day email course could be something like “Free Email Course: 5 Steps to Increasing Online Bookings by 106%”

The headline speaks to the client’s pain — increasing bookings — and allows them to learn at their own pace before contacting your agency to learn more.

Every day they’ll get an email with some valuable advice and actionable takeaways.

By day 4, you can begin showing how your agency used these same tips to increase bookings for a client by 106% (or whatever the increase was), and naturally lead them to want to contact you for a proposal.

How to get started

Once you have your content written, it’s as simple as using a tool like Campaign Monitor (which is what we use), Mailchimp, or something more specific like Drip, to build and automate your email course.

Read this article for more information on creating email courses.

5. Report

A report is a data-driven piece of content — usually a PDF or slide deck — that offers the reader in-depth and up-to-date information about a given topic.

Your prospective clients may be searching for reports that show worldwide trends related to their current project so they can be better informed going into it, or they may need to pitch the need for a project or campaign to their bosses.

At Proposify, we created a free report by poring through aggregate data around proposal creation within our product and put it together in an attractive PDF called The Data Driven Guide to the Perfect Proposal. It’s full of sexy stats around proposal creation like the average time between creating and sending a proposal, how long it takes for clients to view and accept, and how online signatures improve close rates.

Here’s one of the pages in our guide that visually illustrates why it’s important to send proposals as quickly as possible so that leads don’t go cold:

The landing page for this report converts at over 31% and about 4% of people who download it try out our product. Not bad for evergreen content that just sits and collects leads.

If you’re the mobile app agency that works with SaaS startups, your report could be “3 Mobile Statistics Every B2B SaaS Company Needs To Know In 2016”.

In it, you pull together stats from the previous year that indicate where mobile is going, and how to apply it to the future of SaaS.

How to get started

Start by collecting useful data about your topic. You can find expert research on Google Scholar and statistics on Statista. See other places to find statistics.

Next, have your designer create a beautiful, well-designed report using the data. The report should be super-visual and very light on text. The goal is for your lead to print off a page or two of the guide and stick it to the wall in their company’s lounge.

6. Guide/cheat sheet

The difference between a report and a cheat sheet is that a report teaches you the what, and the guide/cheat sheet teaches you how, in step-by-step instructions.

This is paint-by-numbers and should be extremely short and actionable. Like the report, it’s something beautiful you want your lead to print and stick on their wall.

Here’s a lead magnet example of a Scrum cheat sheet.

In our example of the mobile app shop, you could create a guide outlining a list of common design patterns for mobile, and how they differ from desktop software. Call it, “How to Build a Seamless Mobile Experience for your SaaS Customers”.

How to get started

Think about what your prospective client may be searching for as they plan a project. This could appeal to the DIY types who think they can hack something together on their own, only to later realize they need an agency (yours!).

Use your in-house copy and design firepower to create an engaging one-page cheat sheet or infographic they can use as a quick reference guide. Don’t forget to include your branding and call to action!

7. Tool Kit

Have you ever had someone in your agency painstakingly create something for the rest of your team to use in-house? Think templates, or UI widgets, or content management client guides?

Instead of keeping it to yourself, open source that shit!

When I ran an agency we did this with our ExpressionEngine Client Guide, letting visitors download the customizable working files of the same guide we gave to clients. It was a huge hit at the time.

Long before they were bought by Facebook, Teehan Lax released their iPhone GUI Kit as both Photoshop and Sketch files.

While neither of these are being used as direct lead magnets (you don’t need to leave your contact details to download the tools), you could easily require a sign-up in order to download.

If you’re a digital marketing agency, you could release a free 90-day social media calendar tailored specifically for hotel/travel companies, or whatever your industry niche is. Be sure to include your agency branding and website, along with a CTA somewhere so they know to contact you for a proposal.

How to get started

Think about what assets you’ve created internally that your prospective clients could benefit from, but isn’t your core product.

Are there design files or software you’ve built for yourself clients that you can open up and make available free to leads?

8. Case study

At Proposify, we regularly pull together case studies and post them to our website, and users who visit the case studies convert over 14% higher than those who don’t!

You don’t need to publicly present your case studies on your website. Instead, you can request an email address before sending them out and then use a tool to present the case study and track email opens.

a user who requests a case study is likely very warm to your company already and wants more in-depth, meaty example of how you’ve helped past clients.

We’ve already produced an in-depth post on creating great case studies, so check out the tips outlined there.

Driving traffic to your lead magnet

Once you’ve decided on your lead magnet and have begun the process of creating it, the next step is to think through the funnel. How will you get it into a prospect’s hands?

PPC

Facebook ads work great for this because 1.7 billion people are on FB, and you can directly target based on preferences, such as what blogs they read, what pages they like, and a ton more.

Don’t forget other social platforms as well, like Adwords, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter.

Q&A sites

Quora and Reddit are also great for promoting lead magnets because people post questions the community can answer.

Answer the question in as much detail as you can, but post a link to your landing page for people to learn more. The better your answer, the more votes you’ll get to push the answer higher on the page.

Leverage other people’s networks

Guest blogging and speaking at conferences are effective ways to demonstrate your authority to your target audience.

At the end of a guest post, instead of linking directly to your site, link to the lead magnet landing page instead of your home page.

If you’re speaking at an event, post a phone number up on your closing slides at the end of your talk and ask the audience to text to receive your free offer. Once they text, set it to trigger an auto responder asking for their email to send them the lead magnet.

Pro Tip: Make the link expire after a set amount of time so people don’t procrastinate in consuming the lead magnet.

Bottom line: Test which channels send you the most qualified leads and then optimize your landing page for conversion. Especially for an agency business, quality of leads are much more important than quantity.

Be sure you have a tight follow-up process so that quality leads coming into your funnel are being nurtured and you’re sending proposals to the very best ones.

Conclusion

Agencies are notorious for the “cobbler’s kids have no shoes” mentality when it comes to their own sales and marketing. Few take the time to create a repeatable system for generating leads. I hope these lead magnet ideas inspire you to create your own. Let me know if there are any other ideas you have in the comments.

There’s a lot of “I’m OK, you’re OK, mistakes are OK” talk out there in both the business and self-help world. That you have to make mistakes to really learn, that mistakes are part of growing, or that mistakes can bring unexpected opportunities.

All of these are true for the most part, but when you’re in middle of a crisis because your client’s website crashed during a very crucial online campaign, it’s hard to see the future lesson and feel gratitude in the moment.

You need to find a way to quickly deal with this situation to get things back on track, salvage your relationship with the client, and protect your business reputation.

I’m referring to business mistakes that were made accidentally, whether it was something your team did (or didn’t) do, or it was something under your agency’s responsibility. An oversight, a breakdown in communication, a technological glitch. Situations that weren’t intentionally illegal or negligent.

For the purposes of this article and to stay within the realm of my experience, I’m not going to deal with business mistakes that endanger lives, even if a 10,000 label misprint can feel that intense. Those kind of situations require the advice of a real-life, qualified lawyer and I don’t even play one on TV.

1. Admit it already

And do it fast. Public relations professionals know this as a pillar of their crisis management plan. Don’t delay admitting there’s a problem or your role in it. Yes, it’s important you understand the situation but you need to get out in front of the issue quickly.

The longer you wait to address the mistake and your part in it, the more time your client, or your competition, has to create their own narrative around what happened and what might happen in the future.

Plus, complete radio silence makes people feel like you don’t care or that you’re not doing anything. The more time your client hears nothing from you, the more time they have to get angrier, more frustrated, and maybe even more litigious.

Obviously you shouldn’t take responsibility for something you didn’t do, but don’t try to deflect blame if it is indeed your fault, even if the issue wasn’t directly your fault but under your responsibility.

A year or so ago the company that hosted (notice past tense) Proposify’s site was having a lot of issues. It resulted in our app going down for hours at time on a few occasions. For our customers who were working on tight proposal deadlines (and aren’t they all?), this was a frustrating crisis of near disastrous proportions.

The reality? It wasn’t directly our fault. We had no control over what was happening with this hosting company. But in our customers’ eyes, Proposify had gone down. WE had failed them. And even if the issue wasn’t our fault, choosing an unreliable host was.

So we didn’t say, “So sad, too bad, but not our fault!” We apologized to our customers for the service disruption, told them the issue was with the host but that we were working with them to find a solution, and that we would be evaluating whether or not we continued to do business with them. We also assured our clients that their data was still safe and secure.

We tried to do everything within our realm to calm the situation and make our customers feel like the problem was being addressed, even if maybe there wasn’t a clear solution right away.

So buck up and own up. Delays and playing the blame game are just going to worsen the situation.

2. Apologize. PROPERLY.

Before I say anything else, let me give you the most important piece of apology advice EVER:

Regardless of whether you’re apologizing personally, professionally, or politically, NEVER use the word ‘IF’.

As in, “I’m sorry IF you felt disrespected”.

That’s not an apology. That’s basically telling the other person they’re an idiot for feeling how they do, or for interpreting your actions that way.

Saying ‘IF” when people are expecting and needing an authentic, sincere apology is going to add fuel to an angry fire and worsen the situation. Don’t do it. Ever.

Also, don’t fall into that trap of thinking that if you say you’re sorry, it means you’re liable. This is why a lot of professionals and corporations avoid apologizing. They think it makes them look weak or that they were at fault.

Sometimes people want to hear “I’m sorry” as a way of acknowledging their pain or inconvenience, not necessarily to place blame. It’s respectful to apologize to someone who is in a difficult situation.

You can say, “I’m sorry this happened to you.” Or “I’m so sorry that this is the situation.”

A few days ago, I waited on hold for 55 minutes to speak to Bell Aliant, the company that handles my phone, internet, and cable TV services. Because I was cancelling some of those services (goodbye landline and TV, FINALLY), I had to actually speak with a human.

I waited for 55 minutes to speak to the first customer service representative who then put me on hold for another 20 minutes while they transferred me to another rep.

The first guy apologized. “Ugh, I’m really sorry you had to wait that long. That’s not what you want to be doing on a Sunday. Let’s try to get this taken care of quickly.”

It wasn’t his individual fault that Bell’s support queue was whacked on crack, and I knew that, but by apologizing and acknowledging how crappy the situation was, it softened my rage somewhat.

However, when I finally got to talk to the second guy, the one I waited an additional 20 minutes for on top of the previous 55, and I politely told him I was frustrated, he said, “Yeah, we’ve been really busy today.” Thank you, Captain Obvious.

I knew that he was no more responsible for my wait time than the first customer service rep but not even acknowledging my inconvenience ticked me off. I already had the perception that this company gives a rat’s ass about their customers and this perception deepened and soured with every minute I waited on hold. And now here he was proving me right.

A simple, “I’m sorry you were on hold so long. I’ll mention it to my supervisor about the wait times. We were really busy today” would have gone a loooooong way in improving my mood when he tried to use a discount to deter me from cancelling. I wasn’t having it. AT ALL.

So say you’re sorry. Acknowledge their pain, inconvenience, and distress. DO NOT SAY ‘IF’. An apology can help create a situation where your client is more open to forgiveness and your solution.

Depending on the severity of the situation, you can write an apology letter to your client, call them on the phone, meet with them in person, or a combination.

My advice is to always call or meet with them in person, at a minimum. Only sending a letter feels like you’re getting off a little easy by hiding behind the screen but a letter is a nice follow-up to a verbal apology.

3.Find a solution

The most important thing after admitting there’s a problem and apologizing, is telling your client how you’re going to fix it and make things right.

This is obviously more complicated and the details depend on the specific situation, but you need to come up with a meaningful solution that will make your wronged client feel like you’re taking this seriously and that you care.

Ideally you have a solution already figured out when you acknowledge the problem and apologize, so you communicate it all together. But that’s not always possible depending on how complicated the situation is, whether or not third parties are involved, etc.

So rather than waiting to admit and apologize until you have a solution (because we’ve already learned in this post that communication delays are dangerous no-nos), tell your client that you are working on a solution and give them a reasonably soon deadline when you will get back to them with more information on next steps.

And make sure you do indeed get back to them by that deadline. Even if you still don’t have everything quite figured out yet (and there better be a good reason for this), at least touch base to report on your progress so they know you’re still in top of things.

When thinking about solutions, most people in business immediately jump to offering a refund, but according to digital agency consultant, Karl Sakas, a refund isn’t always the right approach or the best thing for the client.

Sakas suggests a few things unhappy clients might want instead:

• A new contact at the agency.
• A refund, either full or pro-rated.
• Additional free “make good” work.
• Re-do the work, ASAP.
• Apologize to their boss.
• Let them vent, with no further deliverables on your part.

Sakas goes on to explain:

“Don’t automatically jump to a refund. One, it costs money. Two, it may not be what they want.

For instance, when the delivery person fails to deliver my Sunday New York Times, I don’t want a $7 refund—I want the paper because I was looking forward to reading it. If they can re-deliver the paper within a couple hours, I don’t care about a credit on my account—I’m in the “re-do the work, ASAP” camp.”

After you’ve agreed on a solution that is acceptable to both you and your client, make sure your agency follows through and completes it as soon as possible. Once the solution has happened, follow up with your client to confirm they are satisfied with the result and to reaffirm that you value the relationship.

4. Learn from it

I don’t feel good when I screw up but I do try to keep things in perspective and remind myself that humans are not perfect and that mistakes are about growing and learning and blah blah Oprah blah. At least, that’s how I feel the FIRST time I make a mistake.

But when I make the same mistake twice (and I admit, it happens more often than I’d like), that’s when I am really hard on myself. That’s when I should know better. That’s when I ignored the signs, ignored the lessons, and was careless. That’s when I really feel like a full-fledged idiot.

Your agency, and the people in it, are going to make mistakes. Guaranteed. So once you’ve dealt with the immediacy of fixing things with the client, don’t just shrug your shoulders or wipe your brow and move on. You and your team need to review why it happened and how you’re going to drastically reduce the chances that this particular problem will ever happen again.

That may require changes to processes, personnel, technology, external partners, or a combination of all of these factors. Figure out what it takes and implement those changes across your business. It doesn’t hurt to share these plans with your client, it will further reinforce your commitment to providing excellent service, and the seriousness of your apology.

5. Move On

OK, so you admitted there was a problem, you apologized sincerely, you created a solution, and you implemented changes to prevent a recurrence. Now, it’s time to move forward and get back to business.

Don’t beat yourself up, don’t beat up your team, don’t blame the client, nor should you continue to apologize every time you see them. If you’ve followed these steps properly, then your slate, and conscience, should be clean.

And remember to keep mistakes, yours and those around you, in perspective. At least you weren't the person in charge of Heinz Ketchup's QR code campaign that accidentally linked to a German porn site.

With online products, solid user onboarding is absolutely essential. It’s how you take a visitor from your home page through to signing up for your product, delivering a “wow” moment within minutes of trying it out and — done correctly — it can convince a new user to stick with your product long term as a paying customer.

But it’s not just online products that require user onboarding.

Think about where the term “onboarding” comes from; literally boarding an airplane. What does the process look like from the point at which you purchase a plane ticket through to when you’re sitting comfortably in your seat?

Or how about when your new MacBook arrives — what are all the little prompts that take you from opening the beautiful packaging to setting up your account?

Instead of onboarding we could just call it “first-time customer experience”.

But how often do you consider client onboarding at your agency? What does your process look like after a new client signs their contract?

What are the benefits of client onboarding?

Imagine this: you’re talking to a sales lead, you validate them, pitch a proposal, and then close a five figure deal. Now it’s time to begin the project so you send them an email:

“Hey Lana,

Thanks for signing the proposal! Here’s Wendy, your account manager. She’ll take care of you from here and let you know when there’s something to see. Cheers”

How cold does this make you feel? Lana hasn’t ever worked on a project like this before, that’s why she’s outsourcing it, yet now she probably feels like she’s just been pawned off and has no idea what to expect from the person who sold her and no confidence in this new person who’s just been dropped on her.

Instead, a good client onboarding process does the following:

• Removes confusion or doubts. Being able to see at a bird’s-eye view what the end project looks like and how it will all come together manages the client’s expectations.
• Builds trust. The more a client trusts you, the more likely they are to defer to your team for their expertise instead of micromanaging every detail.
• Removes buyer’s remorse. They will feel cared for and appreciated, so they’ll be happier with their decision to hire your agency. This can only increase retention and referrals.

Now that we know why onboarding is important, let’s go through how to actually do it right.

Get the client to commit before onboarding

I once had a client who was eager to begin their branding and website re-design before the contract was signed and the deposit paid. I ignored my better judgement and agreed to move ahead, confident the business side would be wrapped up a day or two afterward.

We held the kick-off meeting and even began some first draft creative when the client called to say he was pulling out of the project and wanted to keep his existing website. That translated into over 10 hours we sunk into a project that we didn’t get paid for.

So learn from this story and don’t schedule the kick-off meeting until the client signs the contract/proposal and pays their deposit.

The client may try to persuade you to “just get it kicked off” because so and so needs to sign the cheque and the deadline is looming. You may think starting the project is a sign of goodwill and you don’t want to start the relationship off saying no.

Well, that’s your client’s problem, not yours. Your policy is you don’t start any work without a signed contract and paid deposit. Stick to your guns, this is business. The exchange is mutual, so if your client can’t commit resources on their end but they expect you to, it might be a red flag that there are going to be further problems down the road with them.

With that bit of nastiness out of the way, let’s say they’ve signed the contract, paid deposit, and you’ve scheduled the kick-off meeting. How do you start the onboarding process?

Prepare for the kick-off meeting

As in most things in life, preparation is key.

1. Call the client right away. Whoever sold the deal should call to thank them for their business. A phone call adds a nice personal touch.

2. Ensure the client brings everyone on their team who will be involved in the project to the kick-off meeting. This is important. Try to get the final decision maker, (CMO, CEO, etc) in the room. If you need to know about the client’s tech stack, bring in the head of IT.

3. Schedule the kick-off meeting and send out the calendar invite.

4. Create an agenda for the kick-off meeting ahead of time and send it out to get the client thinking about what you’re going to talk about so they come prepared with answers.

5. Have the client attend the meeting in-person at your office if at all possible. Have a good meeting space (or rent one) with a quiet, comfortable room where everyone can talk freely without other staff members walking through.

6. Have a whiteboard on the wall with markers, and provide pens and notepads for everyone. Everyone should feel free to sketch out ideas. I once had a client bring along an assistant with a clunky Windows laptop that she loudly typed notes on during the meeting. It was annoying.

7. Be hospitable. Your client won’t remember what was said at this meeting months down the road, but they will remember how they felt. Have sandwiches or sweets on the table with coffee, cream, and a big pitcher of ice water. Take them out to lunch or dinner after the kick-off meeting and pay for it. Make them feel like they are your only client.

The kick-off meeting

The project kick-off meeting is the most important part of client onboarding for three reasons:

1. As mentioned already, it starts things off on the right foot and makes the client feel confident about their choice in hiring your agency.
2. It clarifies and reinforces for the client what is and isn’t included in the project scope and what they can expect. Clients may forget what they signed off on a few weeks ago or maybe their needs changed in the meantime. Some clients get in a kick-off meeting and start talking about new features they want that were never discussed before. Prepare for that possibility and have a process to deal with it.
3. It gets your team members up to speed on what was discussed during the sales process, although everyone should have read the proposal before the meeting. It also introduces key team members to the client, so they know who’s working on the project.

Who from your agency should be present at the kick-off meeting?

The person who sold the project. Whoever closed the deal and built the first stage of the relationship with the client should be there for at least 10 minutes at the beginning of the kick-off meeting. This could be the agency owner or account manager. Even if they aren’t involved in the project going forward, coming in to say hi, introduce the team, and welcome the client goes a long way in not making them feel pawned off.

The account manager or project manager. This could be two separate roles depending on how your agency operates.

The lead strategist. The expert in your agency who is responsible for the work itself. This could be the creative director, lead programmer, or head of marketing, depending on what service you’re performing.

That’s it. Keep it small with only a few people on your side. Even if others are working on the project, having a large crowd of strangers could make the client shy away from real talk — the kind of raw, authentic dialog you need to make their project successful. You also don’t want to appear bloated as the client might start to worry about where all their fees are going.

Now let’s look at some basic questions you should be asking at the kick-off:

Kick-off meeting agenda

Here’s a loose structure for your kick-off meeting:

Establish the vision and goals

The lead strategist should lead the kick-off. Prepare a short introduction so everyone is on the same page in terms of big picture vision and goals, and the client can rest assured knowing that you understand what they’re trying to do at a basic level.

Ask your client, “Tell me in one sentence, what does success look like?”

Often kick-off meetings get hijacked by one person who drones on and on about their company or product and wastes valuable time when you could be talking about something else. So ask them to keep it to one sentence so you can move on!

Review the current state for benchmarking

If the client doesn’t know where they are now, it will be impossible to know if what you do for them ends up making an impact.

If at all possible, get access to the client’s Google Analytics account before the kick-off meeting so you can discuss key metrics you want to move the needle on.

Understand the target persona

You aren’t building something for your client; you’re building something for their client. Ask as many details as you can about their target persona. You may end up developing personas for the client unless they already have them.

What are the user’s goals? Often user goals and client goals differ. A Facebook user may want to communicate with friends easier, whereas Facebook wants to generate more revenue from ads.

Your job is to somehow link the two together so that when the user succeeds, the client succeeds.

Content

Who is preparing the content for the project? Hopefully not your client. Discuss the key pages that need to be written, and what the tone and style should be. Use the whiteboard to wireframe the main pages and their sub pages.

Creative

Ask the questions you need to inform design or creative concepts. Smashing Magazine wrote a good article for design-related kick-off meetings.

Tech

What are you building for the client in terms of feature requirements? Here’s where you talk about exactly what you’re building from a functionality standpoint, the technology you plan to use, and how to deal with any unknowns or potential issues that may arise.

Roles

Assign one person to be the single point of contact on both the agency and client side. Discuss who in the meeting is responsible for each part of the project.

Process and tools

Your agency should have a solid process for replicating successful projects. Here’s where you walk your client through your process and demonstrate the dangers if the process isn't followed.

For example, we would tell people that if they didn’t get their copy finalized by X date, it would delay the final launch. The client comes first, but not at the expense of profitability.

Next introduce them to the tools they’ll be using as part of the project.

Project management software options: (hopefully you’re already use one of these) Basecamp, Trello, Teamwork, Asana, Podio.

Show the client how to leave messages and comments in the tool and review the progress of the project.

You may also want to give them a glimpse into the other tools you’ll be using in the project.

Marketing software like Hubspot, Campaign Monitor, Moz, Google Analytics.

Content management tools like Wordpress, or my personal favourite, Craft.

You don’t want to overwhelm the client or turn the kick-off into a training session; you just want to give them a complete picture of what the project will look like from beginning to end and what they expect later. Think of it as a 60-second trailer, not a feature presentation.

It’s a few years old now, but I’d recommend checking out Paul Boag’s kick-off meeting agenda.

First deliverables

You’ve wrapped up the kick-off meeting, broken bread together, and everyone is pumped to start the project.

For me, the final stage of client onboarding is the first deliverable you produce. In general, they are:

Project Brief/strategy. Regardless of what kind of project you’re performing, it needs to start with a written brief or strategy. This document is the by-product of the kick-off meeting and outlines what was discussed, and what the big idea or strategy is that will accomplish the goals set out at the meeting.

Detailed workback schedule. Coupled with the strategy/brief, the workback schedule visually shows all the moving pieces, who is responsible for what, and when. Gantt charts work nicely for this.

I recommend a conference call or video chat to present these as opposed to just emailing them. It allows you to explain the strategy, receive feedback, and make sure everything is understood.

Make sure to set expectations and follow through on them. If the account manager says he will call them every Monday to report the status, then he needs to do it. Managing expectations is an important part of client onboarding so when the project is finished they feel like they got what they were promised.

Post mortem

Client projects typically begin rosy, with everyone pumped for the final product and excited to get to work.

The end of a project is typically when everything falls apart. Feedback was late. Your team got busy and missed a couple of deadlines. The client went on vacation just before launch time and now your schedule is a mess. Maybe you had a couple heated conversations with the client.

This is where the follow through at the end is so important, even though it’s the most difficult part.

Businesses like restaurants, software, and even massage therapy clinics have exit surveys, where they gather feedback after the service was performed to see what they did well and where they need improvement.

After a project launches, you or the person who sold the project should book a call with the client to see how everything went.

Simply listen and apply what you learn so you can get better on the next project. Some of it may not be your fault, but don’t get defensive. Yes, some clients are crazy, but if you remove your emotions you may still be able to find ways to improve.

This goes a long way in making the client feel heard and cared for. The client may have had challenges along the way, but the simple act of following up can make them want to do business with you again, and recommend you to their colleagues.

Conclusion

Most project launches are just that, a starting point. It’s impossible to know if they’ll be successful after the first couple of days.

When a project successfully launches, few companies ever reach back out to their clients to see how successful it remains after the 3, 6, or 9-month mark.

Immediately after launching a project, put it on your checklist to leave a note in your CRM or calendar to call the client and ask how (whatever your team delivered) is performing. This can give you great fodder and tangible data for case studies.

It’s also not a bad time to ask for a referral, which if you delivered a great client experience, they’ll have no problem giving.

Assess how your agency onboard clients, and think about ways you can make that first experience a stellar one.

I know I don’t have to tell you how important proposals are to growing your business. But I do think we all might need a reminder about common proposal writing mistakes a lot of people make. Mistakes even smart people like you might be making.

Writing business proposals isn’t fun, I’ll be the first to admit that. So it can be easy to try to rush through to get them off your desk and into your client’s hands without giving them a lot of thought. Another app development proposal? Done. Another PPC campaign proposal? Done.

Hopefully, they’ll be successful.

But what about the ones that aren’t? Do you just shrug them off and chalk it up to, “You win some, you lose some”? Or maybe you place the blame of a deal gone wrong on your sales lead?

What if the real problem was your proposal? And what if just a few tweaks that you might not have thought about before, or maybe you underestimated, could be the tipping point to a big, fat close?

So before you assume the I’ve-been-writing-proposals-for-years-and-I-know-what-I’m-doing position, take a quick peek at these common business proposal mistakes just to make sure you haven’t inadvertently strayed off course.

1. You didn’t qualify your sales leads

This is the biggest and most common mistake in sales and it happens before you even START developing a proposal. When you’re hungry for business it can be hard to resist the urge to chase after anything that moves. But not everything that moves is worth your time, energy, or business.

If you don’t invest some time into figuring out if this lead is the right fit for your company, you could end up wasting hours preparing a proposal only to hear:

“We’re not really ready to make a decision right now. We were just looking to see what’s out there.”

“Oh! I had no idea it would cost this much! We don’t have the budget for that.”

“I thought this project was a go but my manager is the one making the final decision and she wants to go with an agency she’s worked with before.”

Ugggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh.

This is all information you could have secured BEFORE you spent ten hours designing a proposal, working with your team to come up with a great pitch, and sustaining a deep commission-less heartache.

By determining the answers to these simple questions during your initial conversation with every sales lead, you’ll improve the chances of developing a proposal that will actually close because it will be for someone who is actually ready, willing, and able to do real business. And if you choose wisely, you may even end up with a fruitful long-term client.

Ask yourself:

• Does this sales prospect fit into our target audience in terms of industry, size, or revenue?
• Can our services and expertise help solve their problem and reach their goals?
• Does this company have a realistic budget that we can work with to get realistic results?
• Am I talking to the actual decision maker? (if not, make sure you do!)
• Will my team be excited to work on this project?
• Are there any red flags indicating the client might be a big jerk?

If this sales lead is proposal-worthy, then the answer to most of these questions should be ‘yes’, before you ever log in to Proposify. Confirming that this client is actually a good fit for your business will increase your chances of creating a winning proposal.

2. You didn’t focus on the client

I get it. You’re excited to tell your potential new client all about how awesome your company is, how experienced your team is, how you’ve rocked the worlds of previous clients.

All of that is indeed important but somewhere along the way you ended up talking about yourself waaaaaaaay more than you talked about the client and their needs.

I’ve been in meetings with potential new clients where the agency owner has gone on and on about how much a previous client loved our agency. After awhile I could tell the lead had had enough of hearing about someone else and he wanted to hear about how we were going to make him love us.

Your proposal should focus on what your client wants to know, not just what you want to tell them. You need to convince them that you understand their challenges, their industry, their customers, and what it is they need from you.

And make sure you use your client’s full company name several times during the proposal - it will reinforce that you’re focused on them. (BTW, I don’t need to remind you to make sure no other client’s name shows up in your repurposed proposal, right? Right. Find and replace the crap out of that document or you’re going to look disingenuous. And dumb.)

3. You didn’t demonstrate why you’re different

No offence, but companies like yours are a dime a dozen. Even without knowing exactly what industry you’re in, I know this is true. Because it’s rare that there is a business on the planet that’s the only one doing what they do.

It doesn’t mean you’re not good at what you do but most people don’t know how you differ from your competition. (Maybe you don’t even know how you differ from your competition, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Generally clients don’t know the difference between companies for two reasons:

1. They don’t understand the intricacies of your industry. And why should they? If they were experts in your field, they wouldn’t be coming to you for help.
2. You’re not clear in demonstrating your differentiation in a way that connects with their need.

“What’s the difference between Cool Kids web design agency and Skater Rad web design agency? They both build great looking sites, or so their website says. Hmmmmmmm”

If you don’t give your clients reasons to feel like you offer something different over your competition, something they really need, chances are they’re going to make their decision about your proposal based on price. And that’s the last thing you want. Because just like you don’t win friends with salad, you don’t win quality clients with price.

So be explicit about what you do that makes you unique, make it easy for the client to evaluate the difference between you and the competition, and help them feel smart for choosing you.

4. You listed features instead of talking about benefits

Features are facts. Facts are great but only if you understand WHY they’re great. Otherwise, who cares?

Who cares if you build mobile apps using Sencha Touch? If your client doesn’t understand why having their app built in Sencha Touch is going to make it more successful, then it just won’t matter to them. Or better, why should they pay MORE to have you build their app using Sencha Touch compared to your competition who uses JQuery Mobile, which is cheaper?

So if you’re listing features in your proposal as a way of persuading your sales lead to choose your company, it’s going to go right over their heads unless you explain why they should care. Remember, they’re not the experts in this arena, you are. So you need to explain it to them.

I’m not suggesting you don’t talk about features but they need to be accompanied by their benefits. This happens to me sometimes here at Proposify. One of our super-smart developers will tell me about something they’re working on or a change we’re going to make and they want to tell our customers.

My automatic response is, “Why will our customers care? How will this affect them?” Once I know the benefit of what they’re working on, then I can figure out how to communicate to our audience in a way that gets them excited or builds their confidence in our product.

For example, one of Proposify’s features is that we have variables. Variables? Who cares?

Well, variables are small pieces of information that change from proposal to proposal - things like client name, project name, and page numbers. Using our variables feature prevents you from needing to use the dreaded and time-consuming find and replace tool every time you write a proposal.

So in a nutshell, variables save you time filling in all those little details, plus it’s going to make sure you don’t accidentally leave another client’s name in a new proposal, which is tantamount to a nuclear business disaster.

So make sure when you’re writing your business proposal that you demonstrate how your features are going to alleviate a pain point for your client or improve their situation in some way.

As ye olde saying goes, “Features tell, benefits sell”.

5. You let typos, bad grammar, and jargon run amok

OK, seriously. I feel like my mother on this topic, like a freaking broken record. But I still can’t believe the amount of typos, sloppy grammar, and infuriating use of jargon I see in proposals, sales materials, blog posts, and arrghhhhhhhhhh!

I’m not saying you have to be Oxford Dictionary perfect but for love of their, they’re, and there, get someone who is literate to proof your work before you send it to your client. I don’t even trust myself to proof my own work. After awhile you can’t see your own mistakes so you need that valuable second set of eyes to catch things before they fall through the cracks and make you look stupid.

And typos don’t just make you look stupid, they make it look like you don’t care, that you’re not paying attention to the details. While your client might not be hiring you to write the literary novel of the century, they are hiring you to care and be on top of details.

One UK study showed that a single spelling mistake on a website can cut online sales in half because it diminishes the confidence the user has in that company. The same could be said for your business proposal. I have disregarded both proposals and résumés based on typos and sloppy writing.

If you don’t have someone you can trust to proof your proposals, use a tool like Grammarly. There’s a great free version that quickly catches misspelt words, typos, and common grammar mistakes.

While you’re at it, cut the jargon from your proposals. It doesn’t make you look smart, it makes your client feel dumb. And no one wants to do business with a company that makes them feel dumb.

Jargon can act like a smokescreen to mask the fact that someone doesn’t really know what they’re talking about, or it can confuse clients if they’re not familiar with the same terms. Like, what the hell is ‘next gen’, anyway? Ugh.

These kind of proposal writing mistakes can negate all the brilliant ideas, amazing price, and beautiful designs of your proposal, and blow your deal in one fell swoop. So be sure to take the time to write carefully, brush up on your grammar, proof your work, and cut the goobledegook words from your proposal.

Conclusion

Avoiding these proposal mistakes won’t guarantee a win, but it can improve your chances substantially. It’s a tough battle out there for business so everything you can do to edge yourself above the competition, even something that seems small, may end up being the difference that makes the difference. And it all starts with a well-written proposal.

Some people think coders are like the programs they write; input a set of instructions and functional code comes out. But in reality, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

As someone who has hired multiple developers over the years — first for my agency and now for my SaaS company, Proposify — I can say I’ve been extremely lucky to have hired some incredibly talented coders. Admittedly, I’ve also hired mediocre developers and a few absolutely abysmal ones. Thankfully, all the devs at Proposify right now are amazing.

Non-technical founders and agency owners often struggle with hiring the right developers because on paper virtually every developer's resume looks the same, mostly filled with acronyms and gobbledygook that sounds smart but who knows? I’ve already laid out our startup hiring process in a past blog post, so I won’t rehash it here.

Outside of a seemingly good personality, solid references, recognizable past employers, and the typical stuff HR professionals look for, how do you know when you’ve found the right kind of developer for your company?

The fact is, you could find a developer who performs incredibly at an agency, but is a disappointment at your product startup. And that’s simply because these two types of companies benefit from two different breeds of developers.

Here are three things to consider when hiring an agency vs startup developer:

1. Speed vs quality

Let me preface this by clarifying that I am not suggesting that agency developers don’t need to write quality code. What they build for clients should be sound under the hood and work properly. What I am saying is that code quality is less important at an agency than it is at a startup.

Why?

Think about what it would be like to be a builder on a movie set compared to a home builder.

A set needs to serve its purpose, which is to look great on film, and be built quickly. It doesn’t need anything else because it’ll likely be torn down within a few weeks.

For a person building a house, it’s a completely different story (pun absolutely intended). The house will still be standing a hundred years from now so care needs to be put into the things you can’t immediately see, like the foundation.

Most clients who hire agencies have immediate needs. They need a website to promote their business, or they need to put out version one of an app to see if they can get traction before raising money and hiring a team.

During this process, strategists and designers may take longer than expected and suddenly developers have even less time than expected to build out the project by a certain date. As a result, they may have to take shortcuts to meet the deadline.

Developers at agencies need to be scrappy and flexible, able to get a working product out the door on time.

On the other hand, product developers at startups aren’t at the mercy of clients, so other than worrying about their financial runway or critical bugs, they can take the time to plan their coding decisions for the long term.

For product developers, long-term coding involves documenting and commenting their code using easily understood naming conventions so that any new developer coming on board can get working with the code faster.

Startup developers also need to take technical debt seriously. Technical debt is the result of taking shortcuts that can, over time, make the entire product unstable, like a house of cards.

Developers at startups should be constantly refactoring their code, which means optimizing code so it’s simpler, more elegant, and has fewer dependencies. Doing this avoids technical debt over the long term, and startup developers have the time to do this.

Questions to ask when interviewing:

For an agency developer:

“Imagine the client calls and has a tight deadline for getting their project built. What are some strategies you’d employ to make sure you ship the release in time?”

For a product developer:

“Have you supported a website or app long term?”

“What are some of the challenges you faced?”

“Tell me about a solution you implemented that worked well at the time and you outgrew it. How did you fix it?”

“How often do you refactor your code?” (looking for any answer BUT ‘never, my code is perfect!’)

“If you were tasked with fixing a bug in a way you know will cause issues down the road, how would you explain that to your manager?”

2. Attention span

Due to the nature of agency work, an agency developer rarely maintains one project spanning over years.

A developer at an agency should enjoy the challenge of starting a new project every few weeks or months. They’re like a surrogate who doesn’t need to raise the baby over the long term.

The agency developer takes advantage of the opportunity to try out new languages and frameworks when starting a new project because they can. They have shiny ball syndrome, and they aren’t ashamed of it.

On the other hand, startup developers are stuck with what the product is built in and need to make the best of it, even if a newer, hotter framework all the cool kids are using just came out.

Software is never ‘done’ so startup developers need to be all about the journey, not the destination. They relish the challenge of building one thing and constantly iterating and improving it over time so it’s the best it can be.

Questions to ask when interviewing:

“How do you feel about working on just one product instead of multiple ones?”

“Tell me about a project you worked on that you’re particularly proud of. What made it awesome?” (looking for an emotional connection to their work)

“Tell me about a challenge you weren’t sure if you could solve and what your solution was.” (looking for creativity in problem solving)

“Tell me about a project that fell apart. Why did it fail? What could have prevented it?”

(looking to see if they place blame, own the mistake, or provide concrete examples of what could have been done differently to prevent it)

3. Specialization vs generalization

Specialists aren’t very useful at agencies. I knew a developer who worked at a large agency and only wrote Actionscript (Adobe Flash’s programming language). There was a time when there was enough Flash work to keep him busy, but as Flash quickly fell by the wayside there wasn’t much work in it for him.

An agency developer should know the full stack, and be able to pick up a wide variety of languages, frameworks, content management systems, databases, etc. When a client comes along who needs changes to their iOS app, or their Drupal website, the jack-of-all trades developer is infinitely more handy to have around at an agency.

As mentioned earlier, products tend to stay in the platform they were originally built in. Even parts of Facebook are still written in PHP — the original language Zuckerburg coded it in.

Therefore, startup developers can be more specialized. If a product requires a heavy duty data mining engine written in Python, or a multiplayer game using node.js, you can have dedicated developers who know pretty much just that and they’ll be busy for years.

Questions to ask when interviewing:

“How many languages have you worked with? Which is your favourite and why do you like it?”

“Are you interested in learning any other technologies? Which ones? Why those?”

“Do you do any work in your spare time?” (for your own development, not paid)

Conclusion

There are a lot of things to watch for when hiring agency or startup developers, depending on the particulars of your business but the above three should give you a good indication of whether or not the candidate you’re looking at is a good fit for your company. 

Thanks to Jonathan Down who contributed ideas and hiring questions to this article.

I’m not a super competitive person in general. To be sure, I like to win and to be successful, but I’ve never been deeply motivated by the actions of others to move me forward. Usually because comparing yourself to others can be fruitless, almost like the unwinnable price war. There are too many unique apples and oranges to ever make an equal comparison, with everyone’s circumstances being slightly different.

Where I want to take my business or how I want to run it may be totally different from my competitor’s finish line. Not being cognizant of those differences or by being competitive just for the sake of ‘winning’ can distract you from your own goals and take you dangerously off course from where you actually want to be.

The challenge is that often jealousy and competition can get mixed up in the same fight, and that’s when things can get bloody. But if you can quell your jealous streak, which holds no positive purpose, and focus instead on specific things you can learn from your competition that can help you achieve your specific business goals, then you’re actually going to get somewhere. Like further ahead.

Beyond Your Business Plan

Most people conduct competitive research when they’re just starting out and working on their business plan. That’s absolutely necessary. But once that’s done and in the can, few business owners have a formal plan or process for continuing to monitor and analyze the competitive market, and that’s where you can start to lose ground.

Markets, technology, hires and fires, consumer behaviour, trends, the economy - everything is changing all the time; sometimes incrementally and sometimes astronomically. And it all affects how you and your competition do business. If you don’t keep an eye on what’s happening, you might miss a major move that could leave you breathing your competitor’s exhaust.

So it’s important to set up a system for monitoring your competition on a regular basis, without turning into an obsessive stalker. Remember, don’t spend more time on their business than on your own.

Where to look

There are different ways to gather business intelligence and the right one for you depends on your industry, your resources, and your budget.

You can hire a consulting firm who will conduct a competitive analysis for you, providing a report with findings and recommendations. And usually with a stiff invoice.

You can also keep an eye out in other, more DIY and dead simple ways:

Subscribe to their newsletter/blog

Most companies have a newsletter or blog providing updates on what’s new or their opinions on industry-related topics. This is a simple way to find out what’s on their mind as well as announcements about new products, services, or clients.

IMPORTANT: Don’t sign up using your work email or even from your work computer. Go incognito by using a personal (as non-identifying as possible) email and a different ISP.

Sign up for a free trial

If your competition is a SaaS company or offers some sort of subscription based service, most have a free trial. Signing up for the free trial will give you a glimpse into their onboarding process, allow you to use their actual product or service, and experience their customer service and retention program.

It’s an easy (and legal!) way to get the scoop on what they’re up to over there. But again, make sure you sign up using a non-work, personal email and as non-identifying as possible.

Follow them on social media

As marketing manager at Proposify, I follow all our competitors on social media. And most of them follow us. When we were in the very early days of Proposify, we used to see it as a badge of honour if one of the competing online proposal software companies followed us on Twitter, and we still do. It means we’re on their radar. But it also means we can watch everything they’re putting out there, how they interact with customers online, and what their online personality is.

Set up alerts

By setting up keywords in Google Alerts, you can be notified about any mentions of your competitors across the internet. Google Alerts is also great for monitoring your own online presence, finding out who’s saying what about you, and any issues in your industry. It’s easy to set up and a really powerful, free tool to monitor what’s happening with your competitors.

We also use another great free service called Warble. It monitors Twitter based on keywords, hashtags, mentions, and phrases. You just set up the words and phrases you want to monitor and every day Warble emails you a list of the tweets containing that information. I use it to monitor mentions of Proposify and relevant keywords so I can engage with users and potential customers, while our growth marketer, Patrick, uses it to monitor activity around our competition.

Search rankings

Knowing what keywords your competitors are bidding or organically ranking for on Bing or Google AdWords gives you valuable business insights on exactly how they are getting search traffic.

Knowing what these keywords are, and how much traffic they are driving to your competition can influence your content, messaging, and overall competitive marketing strategy.

You can monitor competitors’ paid and organic search rankings with tools such as SEMrush or SpyFu. Both of these services offer fairly robust features for free, with paid services for even more data on your competition.

What to look for

There are lots of things your competitors are doing that can be distracting so don’t get too bogged down in every detail — it’s inefficient and you’ll drive yourself bonkers.

You should think of yourself like an intelligence analyst. You need to sift through the noise (like whispers of weapons of mass destruction) to find the key pieces of information that can be used to predict, prepare for, and prevent threats.

So what are those things? As mentioned earlier, a lot of it depends on your own business goals but in general, these are things you can learn from your competition that can inform your competitive strategy:

Cues to the future

Hopefully, your business is regularly thinking about new ways to innovate products, services, or process. Meanwhile, your competitors are doing the same. So you need to watch for cues of what they might be planning. You want to be sure you’re not still designing billboard ads when your competition has moved on to virtual reality.

Sometimes companies tip their hat in their blog posts and updates by giving a “coming soon” or “here’s what we’re working on”.

But more subtly, even things like job postings can give you a hint at what they’re planning. Perhaps they’ve created a new position because they’re going to be offering a new service or developing a new product so reading the job details might offer a few clues of what’s next on their roadmap.

Also, keep an eye on your competitor’s client lineup. Does it seem like over the past six months they’ve been doing a lot more work with one particular industry? Perhaps they’re starting to focus or change their target audience. This could be a great opportunity for you to develop a different niche, or if you’re already servicing that same industry, it’s a wakeup call that they’re on your trail.

Customer service

Customer service (good and bad) can be the tipping point for any business. Outstanding service can be the deciding differentiator in a saturated market.

Understanding how your competition deals with its customers can provide you with valuable intel on changes you might need to make to meet industry expectations. This is where signing up for the trial can be helpful - you can find out how long it takes them to answer questions, how helpful they are, and what kind of support they offer - is it by email or phone, is it within regular hours or round the clock?

New opportunities

By monitoring your competitors’ social media feeds and review sites, as well as through the alerts you set up, you may discover comments by their existing customers and/or target audience that reveal a gap your company might be able to fill, whether in service or feature.

What not to do

You can learn just as many business lessons from your competitors about what you shouldn’t be doing as you can about what you should.

Monitoring your competition may reveal things they should improve on, things they’re not doing very well. This provides an opportunity for you to be sure to learn from their mistakes and maybe come through to save the day for their disgruntled customers.

Seeing what your competition is up to can be an emboldening reminder of your own vision. Here at Proposify, sometimes we discover that one of our competitors has released a cool new feature. At first blush it may make us a little nervous but on closer inspection we realize it’s not a feature we would even consider because it distracts from our main goal of really great proposal software, not a website builder, or a document management platform, or any other number of things.

Same as branding. One of our competitors recently rebranded and changed their name. We were curious, a bit apprehensive even about what effect this might have. But once we saw what they had done, and their new approach/attitude, we weren’t worried. It solidified for us that we were still on the right path for our vision, our customers, and how we want to do business.

How to differentiate your business

We all know that differentiation is the key in business. You need to find a way to make your company stand out in a sea of sameness. And regardless of what industry you’re in, you can drown in that sea.

Looking at the ways you are similar to your competition can help you figure out how to differentiate in ways that matter to your target audience. Is it through brand, service offering, support, or industry niche?

Examine all the things you have in common with your competition and then look at your business to see how it can be stronger, faster, friendlier, better looking, funnier, or smarter than the guys next door.

You do you

Not everything your competition is doing is right for your business so don’t make changes to just to keep up with the Joneses. While you should always be open to innovating and doing things differently, you need to be judicious about which things are worth doing differently.

Change because it will help more than it will hurt.

Change because you know there’s a problem and you want to fix it.

Change because you know you can do it better.

If you’re a designer or marketer, you likely know that humans usually aren’t the logical beings we like to think we are. As products of evolution, our brains have adapted to make some pretty surprising choices that defy common sense.

Decades worth of research has uncovered some of these surprising gems, and while they’re often used to market consumer goods, never forget that the people you sell your services to are also human, and have the same biases.

Here are nine consumer behaviour studies that you can learn from to write more persuasive business proposals:

1. Sunk Cost Effect

We’re reluctant to pull out of something we’ve put effort into.

Source: Arkes, Hal R., and Catherine Blumer, “The psychology of sunk cost”, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Vol. 35, No. 5, December 1985, 124-140.

When we pay a lot for something, or put a lot of time into it, we want to stick with it, even if it’s not working for us.

We see this in SaaS all the time where companies have been using a particular product for years and a newer, better tool comes out. People may be reluctant to switch because they feel it’s more painful to pull all their data out of the old tool and train everyone on the new one, even if it will improve their business in the long run.

It’s not just switching products either, the more you invest in something the more you want to use it too. In a study in Singapore (Ho, Png & Reza, 2014) researchers found that the larger the sunk cost in buying a car, the more the owner actually drove that car.

Takeaway

Getting your marketing qualified leads to invest time and energy into the sales process is a good way to suss out tire kickers and focus your energy on the best leads.

You may think that making leads work for a proposal is a bad thing. But if, for example, they take the time to fill out a large request for proposal document or attend a webinar first, they may be more inclined to accept your proposal because they feel they’ve already sunk a lot of time into it.

Secondly, clients are always going to be hesitant to big changes on how they operate if you haven’t yet established a trusted relationship with them.

So you may think that their CMS is totally outdated and needs to be replaced, but if you suggest too large a switch in your proposal it can hurt your chances of winning. Propose smaller steps to get your foot in the door and work with them before you suggest ripping out the engine and starting over.

2. Negativity Bias

We've a greater recall of the unpleasant over the positive.

Source: 2001 paper, “Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion”.

I experienced this when I used to work the soundboard at my church when I was younger. If I made a mistake and turned on the wrong mic, everyone looked back at me. But the other 95% of the time when things were running smoothly, nobody noticed, and they likely never thought, “Hey, the kid working the sound is doing a great job!”

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow puts this in a more primal context:

“The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. By shaving a few hundredths of a second from the time needed to detect a predator, this circuit improves the animal’s odds of living long enough to reproduce.”

Bottom line - people are risk averse and any bad experience they’ve had can taint how they view something, even if it’s overall been positive.

Takeaway

When we’re selling, take into account any perceived risk the lead may have and focus more on the positive to overcome the negativity bias. People require more convincing that you might think.

3. Optimism Bias

When looking to our future, we tend to inflate the good stuff and downplay the bad.

Source: Sharot (2011), The Optimism Bias. Current Biology.

The opposite side of the negativity bias is the optimism bias.

Research suggests that we deliberately choose to ignore information that we don’t really want to hear while embracing the good stuff. Most people believe they’ll never be the one to get a life threatening disease and instead will live until they’re 100. In fact, this is likely a psychological mechanism to keep us from getting depressed!

Takeaway

Take optimism bias into account when estimating a project. Humans are notoriously bad at sticking to estimates as we always tend to think projects will take a lot less time than they actually do.

Being realistic with a client in terms of how much something will cost to produce or how long it will take to complete may make it harder to close a deal, but you’ll be rewarded down the road because they’ll trust you to tell them truth rather than what they want to hear.

4. Nostalgia Effect

When a person feels socially connected to others, their desire to hold on to their money will weaken.

Source: Lasaleta, Sedikides & Vohs (2014) Nostalgia weakens the desire for money. Journal of Consumer Research.

This reminds me a lot of the carousel pitch delivered by Don Draper in Mad Men.

He makes the case for why nostalgia is effective: “In Greek, it literally means pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.”

This may explain why people went ape-shit when Instagram updated their logo to be less of a skeuomorphic homage to old Polaroid cameras.

There’s a link between nostalgia and social connectedness.

Think about how on social media people bond over games, TV shows, music and clothing from the era when they were kids and teenagers, and share old photos of themselves on #TBT.

And how Gen X’ers in particular went gaga for Stranger Things on Netflix.

In the nostalgia study linked above, it suggests that nostalgia makes you feel more socially connected, and that when you feel socially connected you become less attached to money, and therefore willing to part with it.

Takeaway

Remember to personalize your message when selling to a lead. Are they baby boomers or millennials? Chances are baby boomers would bond with you more over Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. whereas millennials feel more nostalgic for Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Don’t overdo it with the #TBT references, but remember to find common ground with your sales lead as it can put them in a “money doesn’t matter” frame of mind.

5. Price-Value Bias

How we frame a product’s price and features greatly affects its perceived value.

Source: Lee & Zhao (2014) The Effect of Price on Preference Consistency Over Time. Journal of Consumer Research.

This study suggests that when we’re looking for a product for more immediate needs, we opt for one that’s simple and easy. But when it’s required for the distant future, we tend to choose products with a lot of functionality.

However, this means that when we buy that simpler product now, we later experience a desire for one that’s more fully-featured, which causes purchase regret and dissatisfaction.

Takeaway

If your services are similar in price to your competition, potential clients need to start looking at other criteria to help them make their decision.

You could frame it so there are additional services/value-adds in your proposal but the same price as the competition. Or it could be that you charge a higher price for your services, but the client will get much more value, in terms of the quality of service you provide (proven with case studies, for example).

6. Speak-Easy Effect

Words that are easier to say are more trustworthy and valuable.

Source: Song & Schwarz (2007) If It’s Difficult to Pronounce, It Must Be Risky. Psychological Science

You’d be surprised how often sales proposals contain jargon to make the writer appear smart, but their lead doesn’t understand at all. In fact, jargon can have the opposite effect, making the writer seem untrustworthy.

This bias really all boils down to our innate desire for things we’re already familiar with. In a great study back in 1968, psychologist Robert Zajonc found that the more we experience something, the more likely we are to like it.

So while the things we’re familiar with are often considered safe, new stimuli are associated with uncertainty and risk. Think of how when you read hard-to-pronounce ingredients on a label, like ferric sodium pyrophosphate, it comes across as harmful for your body, even if it’s been approved by the FDA.

Takeaway

Always use plain language when speaking to sales leads and in your business proposals. If you’re tempted to use jargon, think about how you’d explain it to a five year old and then tailor your message accordingly.

7. Anchoring Bias

We tend to rely too heavily on the first piece of information seen.

Source: Sugden, R; Zheng, J & Zizzo, D (2013) Not all anchors are created equal. Journal of Economic Psychology 39 (2013) 21-31

Setting a high price for one item makes all others seem cheaper, though this only works when the price shown is actually plausible and not an unrealistic amount.

You’ve probably seen this a lot in infomercials where the announcer asks something like “How much would you pay for a product like this? $299? How about $199? Well, you’d be shocked to know we are selling this at the low price of $49!”

We see anchor pricing in SaaS all the time, where the highest tier makes the middle tiers appear much more affordable.

Takeaway

You should always discuss budget with leads before working on a sales proposal to make sure you’re in the same ballpark and not wasting your time. But let’s say you and the client arrive at somewhere around $20,000 for the project. That’s what they’ll be expecting in the proposal.

Then when they get the proposal it’s a couple thousand dollars less than what they were expecting. The psychology suggests that this has a better effect than if they opened it expecting $18,000 and got exactly that.

8. Round Pricing Preference

We perceive round numbers as more trustworthy and representing higher quality.

Source: Lynn, Flynn, & Helion (2013) Do Consumers Prefer Round Prices? Journal of Economic Psychology

The evidence suggests that we want clean, round numbers when buying, which is contrary to the common opinion that using $X9.99 tricks people into thinking it’s cheaper.

Speaking first hand, I ran a test in the past on Proposify’s pricing page. The control group displayed prices like $50/mo and $100/mo. The variation used $49 and $99. The control group - the round number - converted at a much higher rate than the variation.

Takeaway

We often don’t think about pricing details like this in business proposals as much as in consumer products, but using round numbers can clearly build trust in your offering.

9. Choice Paradox

Too much choice will lead to indecision and lower sales.

Source: Iyengar, S; Lepper, M (2000) When Choice is Demotivating Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000, Vol. 79

In the famous study of jam, consumers were more likely to buy when offered a choice of six jars of jam (40%) instead of a choice of twenty-four jars of jam (3%). Consumers also reported greater buying satisfaction.

I have felt this when ordering a burger and being asked what I want on it. There’s 30+ ingredients in front of me. I like it all. Why don’t YOU tell me what I should have on this type of burger?

Burgers are one thing, but consider someone making a decision about an important long-term investment. If they put off making the decision because of too much choice, this could have more serious implications. And you run the risk of not closing anything.

Takeaway

You should offer a few options in a sales proposal but not too many, otherwise it can delay a decision from being made. People expect the experts they’re hiring to guide them on what they should do. If you’re selling a website project, don’t make them decide on every feature otherwise they may as well just go to Squarespace and do it themselves.

Conclusion

Much credit should be given to the website, Cognitive Lode where I found all these examples of studies and their explanations. Learning more about the psychology of human behaviour and why we do the things we do can give you the competitive advantage in sales. The more you understand about people, the more you’re going to be able to give them what they need, how they need it, when they need it. And ultimately, giving people what they need means more closed deals.

Maybe it’s because I’ve watched way too many horror movies recently about trying to discern whether someone was possessed, undead, or an evil spirit as opposed to a good old fashioned human. It got me thinking about identifying dead sales leads and knowing when it’s time to leave the corpse behind.

Lead generation is challenging so it can be easy to get excited when a new sales prospect comes your way. The glitter, the glam, the five-star potential. I know the rush. “This is going to be a great project, a great client, and a lot of money for the company, not to mention my sweet commission!”

And you should be excited because it helps motivate you to nurture the lead. But no matter how awesome your product or service is, and no matter how convincing a salesperson you are, not every lead is going to convert.

So because time is money, you need to quickly recognize when a lead crosses over to the other side - the dead side - so you can stop wasting your time and move on to something with real, live, profitable potential.

Only 44% of companies are using any kind of lead scoring system [Source: DecisionTree]

1. They don’t have a need for what you’re selling

Most people in sales know that pros don’t sell a drowning man a glass of water. The true professional knows it’s the thirsty man who really needs your water and therefore it’s going to be waaaaaaaaay easier to sell to him.

Remember: you’re not SELLING, you’re SOLVING. And that’s a critical mind shift that smart salespeople understand. If you find people who have a problem you can solve, most of the work is already done.

But if your lead doesn’t have a real need for your product or service, move on. Otherwise, you could waste a lot of valuable time trying to convince the inconvincible.

Or maybe you do convince that person but they end up unhappy because they spent money on something they didn’t need, want, or really understand. So much for that long-term, trusted, and potentially lucrative relationship.

2. You’re not talking to the person who can say, “YES”

Recently, a friend who owns a small agency told me a tragic tale, one that many of us has likely lived through at least once in our careers.

My friend’s agency was courting a new client and preparing a sales pitch. Their lead at this company seemed enthusiastic, confident, and in control, and she advised the agency team on what the company was looking for.

The agency prepped what they felt was a killer pitch and one that was totally in line with what their contact had outlined. It felt like a slam dunk.

That is until they got in the room on pitch day and the CEO of the potential new client company was there. He didn’t like the pitch at all. In fact, he felt they were completely off base from what he was looking for. He disagreed with the direction his employee had given my friend’s team and basically killed the deal right there.

Lesson here? Make sure you are always talking to the decision maker. It’s fine if there is someone else on their team doing some of the initial leg work with you but before you submit a business proposal or prepare a pitch, make sure you find out what their decision-making process is, with whom the buck stops, and insist that you meet with that person at least once.

If they refuse this request, or if they’re cagey about the process, you might want to bail. You can explain to them politely without insulting their own authority (or delusions of grandeur, as the case may be) why it’s important that you speak directly to the person who’s making the decision so that you can be sure everything is aligned and that you can deliver what they need.

For all you know, the person you’re dealing with doesn’t even have the authority to be pursuing this project, they’re just tire kicking.

Don’t waste your time, or your team resources, pitching to someone who isn’t the deal maker.

3. They send out a lot of RFP’s but always stick with the same vendor

Some companies are addicted to RFP’s and can’t seem to make a decision without one. Developing big, bulky documents every time they have a new project and casting it out into B2B land like a juicy worm on a hook, hoping to lure the big one.

But be careful before you bite. If doing a bit of research on this lead (which of course you do, right?) shows that they have released four RFP’s a year for the past five years and have always chosen the same vendor, you might want to snub your nose that wriggly worm and hold off submitting a project proposal.

Ask your sales lead about their relationship with their existing vendor. Are they ready to make a change? What are they looking for that they think can be achieved by working with someone new? You want to be sure to avoid a sunk cost effect.

If they’re just releasing RFP’s as part of the requirements in their purchasing process and not because they actually want to change vendors, this may be a lead that won’t follow through.

That’s not to say they won’t ever change, but you need to get a sense of how open to change they are so you can weigh the risks of continuing to pursue their business and the effect it will have on your sales funnel.

4. They don’t have the budget

About 8 years ago when I first started freelancing, I made a rookie mistake, ONCE. A friend referred a colleague who needed a new website for his financial consulting services. I thought this was great opportunity and that it would help me gain access to the other consultants he worked with who also might need marketing and communications help.

The consultant worked in a town about an hour away and I didn’t really ask him much before I set up the appointment. I drove the hour there and brought along Kevin, now the co-founder of Proposify but at that time he had a web development agency. I figured we could partner on this job.

Things started off just fine, talking about what the guy needed for a site, what the process would be, timeline, etc, etc. But then a budget number came up. And I was so shocked by this person’s ignorance about what a new website development would cost at that time that I actually laughed/choked when he said what his budget was.

It wasn’t just small, it was infinitesimal.

I thought maybe the situation could be saved by educating him on what was involved, what the average price range was, etc. But he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, budge. This was the number he had allocated, even if the only person who might be able to do it for him at that price was a tech-savvy teenager.

So there wasn’t really much to say after that. Kevin and I left, having wasted a half day on a dead end lead. I still wondered if I could maybe save the deal but the budget leap from where he was and where we could even consider working together was so huge, deep down I knew there was just no way.

So when I got home, I sent him a polite email explaining the situation and wishing him the best. And I didn’t waste one more minute on it.

But if I had just asked the guy a few questions about budget expectations before I got Kevin involved, before we both drive an hour to spend two hours in a conversation that went nowhere and before we drove another hour to return home empty-handed, I would have recognized this wasn’t an opportunity worth pursuing.

Getting the straight truth from a prospect about their budget can sometimes be challenging because they often assume that your number is always going to be high when they likely could get it lower.

When our CEO, Kyle, had an agency he would often broach the budget subject this way:

"I can build you a rowboat or an ocean liner. Both will be seaworthy but budget determines which one you get."

Then if the client said, “What does a rowboat cost?”, it gave him the opportunity to answer with: "We usually start around $X,000 for a very basic website.” Then the client either balked or said they could afford more.

The bottom line on the bottom line? You can’t get blood from a stone. If they don’t have the budget, you don’t have a deal.

And don’t even THINK about low-balling, telling yourself it will be just this one time and it could pay off. That kind of pricing strategy rarely pays off, more often delivering a world of pain in the long run.

5. You don’t offer the feature or service they want

Here at Proposify, we offer a variety of features that make it easier for businesses to create winning proposals, close deals faster, and manage their sales process.

While the majority of our customers love our feature set, we do get questions from time to time about other features, things we don’t offer. Sometimes these are features that we have on our roadmap to develop over time, while others are what we believe to be outside the scope of our product vision.

Most people are cool with this, but for others, not having a particular feature or functionality is a total deal breaker.

We understand, but we’re not going to waste our time, or the customer’s, trying to convince them to sign up for a tool that won’t meet their needs. It will be a headache in the long run with added questions for support, potentially bad reviews, and they’ll likely cancel after a short time.

If a company hasn’t found what they need from us during their trial, it’s not likely we’ll ever be able to convert them. Case in point, our CEO, Kyle, recently referred one our trial customers to a competitor. While they liked us in general, there was a feature that was a major priority to them that we were never going to develop.

It stung a bit to send them down the road, but in the long run Kyle knew that this company was likely never going to convert, especially to a higher priced plan. It made more sense to invest our time in converting people who want what we have and who are more likely to upgrade.

Remember what we talked about in point #1: your job is to solve a problem. If you don’t have the feature or service to solve that problem, it’s better to move on to a better fit.

However, if you do end up developing some of those features, make sure you get back in touch with those lost leads. It may be that finally the timing is right.

6. They don’t have a deadline

Another question you need answered before deciding to prepare a sales proposal is about the deadline for the project.

If your sales lead is vague about when they want to start or complete the project, this is a major red flag that it may never happen. Or at least there’s no urgency to make it happen, which means you could waste a lot of time and resources nurturing this lead when the project isn’t even a priority to them. And if it’s not a priority to them, it shouldn't be a priority to you.

Without an articulated timeline, they will likely delay making a decision on the contractor and drag the whole process out, wreaking havoc on your sales pipeline.

Plus, if there’s a big time gap between when you scope out their project in a proposal and when (if) the project happens on some elusive date in the future, a lot could change about the project, the market, the technology, and your own resources. Then you’ll have to submit another proposal. Ugh.

Don’t waste your time on people who don’t have any sense of time. If anything, you can follow up with them in a few months to see if they’re closer to a launch so you can move on to work with people who are ready to do business. Now.

It’s hard to say goodbye

Sales is not for the weak-hearted or the thin-skinned. You can’t let one ‘no’ from a client set you back. At the same time, you need to recognize when you’ve hit a dead-end with a dead lead. Otherwise, you’ll end up spinning your wheels, making no money, when you could be cruising after a hot lead, and a big pay-out.

During the preparation of the countless number of proposals I worked on during my years in the agency trenches (and sadly we had no Proposify back in those dark ages), inevitably someone would raise the question, “Do you think we should include case studies?”.

As if it were a choice.

My strong belief is that you should ALWAYS include case studies with your proposals, especially when going after new leads who don’t know your experience, ability, or successes.

The exception to this rule might be when you’re doing up a quick proposal as a formality for a new project with an existing client. But be careful. It can be easy to assume existing clients already know everything you do and have done, but often they only know you in the context of the work you’ve done for them already.

Proposals outline what you’re going to do for a client. Case studies prove that you can actually do it. 

Proposals outline what you’re going to do for a client. Case studies prove that you can actually do it. 

No matter how many times you claim you have “extensive experience”, without a case study to back it up those words can be meaningless, and risky, to a new prospect.

Businesses are often resistant to case studies because it’s more work to create them on top of everything else, especially when you’re in the time-sensitive throes of preparing a proposal.

The key is to stop seeing case studies as optional and instead view them as an essential selling tool; the tool that just might be the tipping point between you and competition.

Here at Proposify, we've seen really good return from featuring case studies on our site:

Case studies don’t have to be complicated, they just have to convincing.

Here’s a simple guide to creating compelling case studies that close deals. You can expand on these to make your particular case studies more elaborate if you like but as long as you have the basics, it should do the trick.

1. Develop Case Studies Before You Need Them

I admit I have groaned at the thought of doing up case studies when we’re T-minus zero trying to get a proposal out the door. But the trick is to have them ready to go BEFORE you need them in a crisis.

Assign case study development to your team as a proper internal project and start developing them between proposals.

It will be a lot easier if you’re regularly doing debriefs with clients after each project to see how things went and then following up a few months down the road to track results. This way you’ll already have source material to work with plus compelling stats that really make your case studies stand out.

You can customize them to fit the particular need of each proposal once the time comes but at least you won’t be running around trying to decide which projects to do, getting permission from clients, writing the copy, getting approval, hunting down images, and designing them all at the last minute.

2. Make Them Representative and Recent

When deciding on which projects to turn into case studies, make sure they represent the range of your services. That way you have case studies ready to go that reflect all the the types of projects you might be bidding on in a proposal.

Ideally you have a couple of case studies for each service and main industry but if you can focus on having at least one good, results-driven case study for each area of your business offering then you’re covered.

Also, make sure each case study is fairly recent. Technology, markets, and industries change quickly so you want to be sure you’re demonstrating that you’re relevant, leading edge, and in demand with your solutions.

Depending on the industry and service two years, three tops, is a good life cycle for a case study.

3. Get Client Permission

Once you have your list of projects you want to feature as case studies, the first thing you should do before actually going to work on them is to get permission from the client to feature their company.

Some clients don’t want their business challenges or practices talked about publicly for a variety of reasons. Issues related to liability, privacy, and competition can make clients a little shy of the spotlight.

Government clients can be hesitant about case studies, but sometimes they’ll work with you to omit sensitive details so you still get a solid case study that makes everyone happy.

For other clients, case studies can be a great way to promote their business. You can let them know the case studies will be featured on your website and blog in addition to being included in proposals.

Since you’re only going to feature projects that had a positive outcome, clients will be happy to be seen as “successes”. It makes them look smart for choosing the right solution and they get to show off their good results.

4. Get a Client Testimonial

You can say all you want about how great your work was for Client X but a direct quote from Client X about how awesome it was to work with your company or how their business improved as a result of your solution is GOLD.

Ask your client for a quote on the project you’re highlighting and make it as simple as possible for them respond. It’s helpful if you give them some direction but you want to be careful that they don’t feel you’re putting words in their mouth. Sometimes a client will prefer to have you to write it for them and they tweak and approve it so you can offer that as an option to make it easier for them.

If you can, get a couple of quotes related to different aspects of the project that way you can mix and match depending on what you need for the proposal. You can make this easier by giving the client some framework for their testimonials by asking them questions like:

• What was it like working with the team at our agency? Did you find the process simple? Did you find people knowledgeable? Easy to work with? Flexible?
• What kind of benefits have you seen in your business since we did X project for your company?
• Would you work with us again? Why?

Here at Proposify, Kyle books calls with our customers to get their feedback and we use this information as the basis for our case studies. 

We like the direct contact with our customers and it’s sometimes an easier way to get information from them compared to waiting for a response to an email when they’re super busy. Plus it allows us to get quotes that sound like they’re from real humans as we use their owns words. 

He usually asks these five questions:

• What made you try Proposify?
• What was your ‘a-ha!’ moment to sign up for a paid account?
• Has Proposify improved your sales?
• Does using Proposify influence your close rate?
• Was there a situation where Proposify saved the day? Or helped you out?

He records the call so I can listen to it later and transform the conversation into a case study that we feature on our website and promote through social media. Check out some examples of the case studies on our site.

Obviously you’ve picked this client because you already know these types of questions are going to prompt positives answers. Depending on how complete the answers are you may need to edit the testimonials a bit and if you do, be sure to send them back to the client for their approval.

5. Tell a Story

Lead your reader on the journey of the project and keep it focused on the client. Don’t just say, “We built a new website for Bob’s Burgers because the other one was really out of date and not responsive.”

Tell a story that includes the following elements:

Background: Briefly introduce the company, what they do, their industry. It gives some context for the reader.  

The Challenge: Why did the client come to you? What problem were they looking to solve? What issues were they facing in their industry that made them reach out? Why did they choose your company to help them? Be careful that you don’t paint your client or their business in too negative a light when describing their challenges.  

The Approach: What did your team do to address the problem? What was the process you went through to come up with that solution? Why did you decide that solution was the right one?

The Result: Explain the results your solution delivered to the client, whether anecdotally or even better with hard numbers if you have them. How it made life better for them, how it helped them achieve their goals, solved their challenge, and how they are now positioned for a successful future. RESULTS ARE CRITICAL. If you can’t demonstrate positive results, don’t include the case study. Results are everything.  

In fact, we put results front and centre by including them in our case study headlines.

I find breaking a case study down into these chunks makes it less daunting to prepare, giving you a clear framework to follow.

6. Keep the Format Simple

There are lots of different formats for case studies. I like my case studies to be concise (one page TOPS, including images), easy to skim quickly, and easy to determine the result of the project.

You don’t have to literally use the subheads of background, challenge, approach and results but like blogs posts subheads makes the whole thing easier to read and they get right to the point.

Just like your proposal, the client is likely skimming everything but the pricing page so make it easy for them to get the juicy important bits you want to drive home.

7. Use Beautiful Images or Video

Include images of your work in your case study and for the love of PNG, make sure they are high res and LOOK GOOD.

If the project is non-visual like strategy, design a sharp-looking infographic that demonstrates some aspect of the project, like the results or something related to the client’s business.

Where appropriate show before and after shots but again tread carefully in this area. While it can illustrate how far the company has come and the awesome work you did for them, you want to be sure the company is not made to look bad.

To make your testimonial even more powerful, include a video clip in your proposal of the client talking about the project. Online proposal software like, oh, I don’t know...Proposify?...lets you seamlessly add videos to your proposal. But just like images, make sure the video quality is good — the sound is clear and the whole thing is professionally shot and edited.

8. Customize Case Studies to Your Proposal

The question often falls to “how many case studies should we include?”. I think three is plenty and you can always direct the reader to the portfolio/work/customers section of your website for more (you do have a portfolio section on your site, right?).

The case studies you include should correspond to the needs of your prospect for the particular proposal. Maybe it’s a client who had a similar challenge or who experienced benefits from a similar solution that you’re proposing.

Take the time to review each case study before including it in a proposal to find ways to tailor it to help demonstrate to your sales lead that you have experience solving their particular challenge and you know how to deliver.

For example, if your prospect is looking for a new website that’s responsive with an e-commerce solution and requires copywriting, don’t just send them a case study about how you built a kick-ass website. Make sure it demonstrates all those services.

9. Practice Plain Language

As with anything you write, be sure to follow the rules of plain language writing. Don’t use jargon, be concise, be straightforward, be positive, avoid the passive voice, and if you really need to use technical terms or acronyms, include explanations. Don’t assume your client knows what CSS is.

Conclusion

Case studies are the best way to put the walk in the talk of your proposals. They can help build trust with a prospect with whom you don’t yet have a relationship.

They don’t have to be long, complicated, or with earth-shattering results for the biggest brands in the land. They just need to demonstrate that that you can do what you say you do and when it comes right down to it, that’s all a client really wants to know.

Section Revisions Update

Over the last few months we've been listening to your feedback through customer calls, support tickets, and conferences and decided to make a small but mighty change to the way section defaults are set.

Section defaults are a way of tagging a revision of a section so that each time you create a new proposal or drag it in from the content library, that revision is used.

Previously, Proposify didn't automatically set a default, making the latest version the one that was used when importing content from the library. So if you edited a section in a proposal to tailor it to a specific client, when you pulled that section into a new proposal it wasn’t the base version, but the one tailored to the client. 

To clear up any confusion and make things easier, now when you create a new section in a proposal or template, that is the default until it is imported into a new proposal/template, or edited in the content library. If that section is added to another proposal, a new version is created, editing it there does not affect the default.

If you edit the content library version, you’re editing the default. So now when a section is created in the content library, that is automatically the default. When it's added to a proposal or a template, a version is created but the default has not been affected.

At anytime you can set the default to any version you wish, just click the 'last edited' text by the section name.

Then click 'Make Default' in the revisions fly-out, and it will be the one used when importing and it will be edited in the content library.

I hope this change makes content management easier and speeds up your proposal writing.

Content Library Update

Over the holiday break we took some time to give the content library a makeover, and added Mass Delete to each of the sections for easier content management.

If you want to remove more than one section, click the checkbox in the corner and the delete button will slide out at the top.

This small addition should make organizing your content library a snap. ;)

Client Preview Settings

The last change we made was to add Client Preview settings to the Settings section.

This allows you to set the default settings for your client previews including default language, show accept/decline buttons, allow comments, show total in footer, and control display of ‘Powered by Proposify’.

With these setting set up they way you want them, all future proposals will inherit these settings.

What’s Next

As promised at the end of last year, the Permissions feature is almost ready. We are currently about to start a beta so that we can flush out the details and make it not only super powerful for admins, but also super usable for all the members in your team. We’re excited to launch it soon!

Watching Mad Men I’m reminded of the fickle nature of new business in an agency. One day Jaguar is knocking at your door, the next day you’re laying off half your staff.

In Don Draper’s day the only means to acquire clients was in person pitches, getting articles in the New York Times, or client dinners.

What about today? Unfortunately, many people who run small digital agencies aren’t a whole lot better when it comes to creating a repeatable system for acquiring leads and moving them through a sales funnel.

I wrote about what to do in crisis situations when there is a shortage of leads coming in the door. Now I’m going to outline proven long term strategies for ensuring famines like that never happen in the first place.

The techniques I’m recommending in this article are designed to reduce or completely eliminate the need to meet up for coffee with every new prospect who walks through your door, or participate in the dreaded RFP process.

Instead of spending hours on one lead, you’ll be leveraging your time and focusing it only on highly qualified prospects.

Keep in mind, I’m not saying that you should completely abandon the more traditional sales approach of attending events, handing out business cards, and asking clients for referrals. That can work, but it isn’t scalable or repeatable.

You need to cast a wider net and apply marketing automation if you want the leads to come in more steadily. Here's what the funnel looks like:

Dig Deep and Find Your UVP

It’s almost cliché to say this, but before you create a system for sales and marketing you need to deeply understand who your perfect client is and know your unique value proposition.

Too many agencies are generalists who sell design, development, or marketing to any client who comes to them armed with their chequebook and a brief (OK, maybe they don’t have a brief).

Many agencies are bound by geography, only landing clients who live near them, because location may be the client’s only reason for hiring them over another generalist somewhere else.

How to find your niche

Look back and ask yourself who your best clients were  — the ones you enjoyed working with, achieved results for, and profited from.

Work backwards and uncover what industry they are in, who the key decision maker is, and how your company benefitted them in the past. Then conduct some research to find out how big that market is, who your competitors are, and how you’re going to stand out.

Your agency should be branded to solve a specific problem for a specific group of people, rather than offer a laundry list of services for SMEs. 

Your agency should be branded to solve a specific problem for a specific group of people

Create one or two buyer personas to help you and your account team understand exactly who your customer is. 

From there, begin crafting content for your personas.

Create Targeted Content

Agency blogs are notoriously bland, mostly because agencies rarely specialize. But I know that’s not who you are, because you went ahead and applied the advice above.

So knowing who your audience is and what kind of content they consume, how is your content going to stand out and resonate with them? 

Instead of offering a couple hundred words of fluff, you should aim to create in-depth, helpful content that helps them solve a burning problem (making them laugh doesn’t hurt either).

The content you produce could be in the form of written blog articles, graphics, downloadable guides, videos, or a podcast.

In general, you should have at least one format that you produce every week (like a blog) and another format (like a webinar) that requires people to give you their email address.

For example, you could create a weekly video series like Whiteboard Friday, where Rand Fishkin, the owner of Moz, explains an SEO-related topic using a whiteboard.

Drive traffic to your weekly content through a variety of tactics. You probably know about this stuff already, but a recap doesn’t hurt:

• Organic search traffic - Perform keyword research on topics using a tool like Wordtracker, optimize your articles for search, and build link authority through guest-blogging.
• Email - send out a weekly email to your subscribers promoting the post.
• Social media - Regularly share your posts using Buffer and engage with influencers to get them to share your content.
• Paid media - Experiment with Facebook and Twitter ads, which can have high ROI due to the fine-grained targeting (i.e. lookalike audiences).

After a viewer watches the 3-5 minute video or reads a blog post, include a call-to-action for them to learn more about that topic through an in-depth webinar where they can find answers to more questions.

Webinars

We have discussed webinars on our podcast before, so I’d recommend checking out that interview with Zach Johnson.

You could use a tool like Meercat or Periscope to stream the webinar live, or you could use more traditional tools like GoToWebinar or Hangouts.

Here are the elements of an effective webinar as a lead generation tool:

Landing page and CTA - Your landing page should have a headline that addresses your target audience’s pain point plus a strong call-to-action for them to register for the webinar, workshop, or whatever you decide to call it. 

Email nurturing - Once you have the prospect’s email address you can set them up in an automated drip sequence using tools like Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, or InfusionSoft. Keep them updated on when the event is taking place so they don’t forget it, and also include some additional content, like a free guide.

The webinar itself - You’ve gone through this effort, and now it’s time to put on your dog and pony show. Here are a few pointers:

• Take time zones into account. If most of your audience is in the US and you live in Europe, that likely means you’re going to need to put it on later at night in order to catch people during their working day.
• Prepare thoroughly. Show off a great looking pitch deck. Do a sound check 2 hours before to test that your software is working and people can hear you. Make sure you’re in a quiet room with a door that closes so you feel comfortable projecting your voice.
• Be energetic - No one wants to sit through an hour of hearing someone drone on, so do your best to be spirited. Think of this as a client pitch but to dozens, even hundreds of people at once. Do whatever it takes to be “on”, whether that’s exercising, listening to metal or watching Louis CK before the webinar starts. If it helps, have a team member or guest speaker as a co-host to banter with.
• Answer questions - Remember, this is a sales pitch. The more you interact with your audience, the more you’ll build a personal connection without a hangover of Draper-esque proportions. Have a few canned questions ready to go to put them at ease and get the ball rolling.

Foot-in-the-Door Offer

If you’ve done your job right, at this point you should have a handful of engaged leads who want to talk to you after the webinar one-on-one.

You’ll want to convert them to clients, but first make sure they’re the perfect fit for your agency in terms of budget, size, and desired outcome.

To do this, end your webinar with a foot-in-the-door offer — something that they pay for but is small and easy to close. 

Getting someone to buy something from you, even if it's small, increases the likelihood they’ll buy something more expensive later on. (See the research behind this psychology here)

The FITD offer could be an audit, a discovery session, a one-on-one workshop, a report, etc. Anything your sales team could execute in a couple hours or less.

Here’s just one example of how this could be applied:

Let’s say your FITD offer is a social media report.

At the end of the webinar, show off some visuals of what the report looks like and the value it offers.

Say the report costs $500, but you are offering your webinar viewers an exclusive offer by including a free half-hour consultation along with it.

Introduce scarcity. You can’t offer that free half-hour to everyone so only the first 5 people who respond can get the consultation. (Reality: this is bullshit, you’re going to offer it to everyone who calls).

The phone number and email address you give out should go directly to your gatekeeper for further vetting.

What’s a gatekeeper you ask?

The Gatekeeper

In traditional sales, you have openers and closers.

There’s the person you first meet, who drives you around Orlando showing you the timeshare condos — that’s the opener. 

The person who sits down to talk dollars and cents, continually dropping the price until you buckle under the pressure, sign on the dotted line, give away your money and never once use that timeshare — that’s the closer.

On our podcast we interviewed Carman Pirie who runs a successful inbound marketing agency. He spoke of the importance of having an opener who vets leads on behalf of the owner. I call this person the gatekeeper.

Let’s call your gatekeeper Anna.

Anna is your new business manager. Or your growth ninja. Or your marketing knight. I don’t really care what Anna’s title is, just make sure it’s not “sales associate” since we want people to trust her.

What the gatekeeper does

Anna will help you produce content and handle inbound leads. She should have sales and marketing experience, and you will have trained her extensively on what your agency is all about, your USP, the buyer persona, your processes, CRM, all that good stuff.

Remember, your goal as the owner is to reduce the time that you need to spend on phone calls and coffee with new inquiries so you can spend more time on vetted, qualified, wallet-out, ready-to-buy leads.

So after your webinar you should have a good number of leads calling and emailing you to buy your FITD offer. Anna is going to take those calls and emails, and put them into your CRM.

Throughout the process of producing the FITD and offering consulting, she’ll ask them a lot of questions, learning about their business, their challenges, and goals.

Her main job is to figure out whether these leads are the right fit for your business, and if so, move them to the next stage of the funnel. Depending on the kind of agency you run that could be anything from a large app build to a 12-month marketing retainer.

If the client is NOT a fit, then it’s the gatekeeper’s responsibility to politely end it there. If they want the FITD offer they can have it (they’re paying for it), but she’s not going to waste any time on a proposal or bringing you in to close the big deal.

The client may not have a budget you can work with, they may be in the wrong industry, or their values could simply not align with the agencies. They could also be jerks.

This is why it’s important to pay Anna a good salary and not just commission. Commissions reward salespeople for taking anything and everything they can. Instead, she should be rewarded for taking on the right business.

Closing the Deal

If the client IS a fit then your gatekeeper will need to collect enough information to send them a proposal. 

90% of the proposal can be boilerplate, but the overview, scope, and pricing should be customized to the client and the deal.

Now obviously I’m biased, but using a tool like Proposify can make this whole process a lot more streamlined than making proposals in Word or InDesign and emailing PDFs.

Start by designing a killer template, and get all your content loaded into the library so it can be easily reused. This is all a part of creating a system for automating your sales.

This part is critical: your gatekeeper needs to book a call with you and the client before sending the proposal. 

Once the client is on the phone, send the proposal (In Proposify you’re notified when they open your email, when they click the link, and tells you what parts of the proposal they view).

The Pitch

This meeting is where you as the agency owner get to come in and be the big star.

During this phone pitch, you’ll want to keep in mind the principles I shared from Oren Klaff’s book, Pitch Anything.

The agenda of the call should look something like this:

• Set a time frame. Let them know you only have 45 minutes total to run through this and answer questions.
• Discuss what you know about their goals and challenges. They need to know that you understand them, their industry and their customer. Remember, this is about them and not you.
• Tell the story of your agency; What you stand for, and why you have a unique approach to solving their problem.
• Give them a deadline. At the end of your pitch, let them know you can answer any questions they have as they review the proposal in more detail, but that you’ll need a firm yes or no answer by X date.

Leave it to the gatekeeper for follow-up questions but maintain your deadline for a decision. At this level, your close rate should be quite high since the client has been through several stages of vetting before the call.

Conclusion

The beauty of this process is that you as the business owner are freed up to spend your time only on high ROI activities.

Your week is going to be made up of creating and promoting content, hosting a webinar, and attending a handful of calls to close. Everything else is covered by your sales person/gatekeeper.

Naturally, new business will still come in the old way via word-of-mouth referrals, but adopting these tactics allows you to turn business development into a real system that is repeatable and scalable.

I’d love to know what you think in the comments, and if you like this idea feel free to share with others.

Here’s a fact: Every new client you win at your agency happens thanks to the contribution of every single person who works there.

But I bet if you asked your employees which of them are in sales, only the sales team would answer affirmatively.

According to Forrester Research, fewer than 50% of marketers think they’re responsible for increasing top-line sales growth or profitability.

So if your sales and growth seem to have hit a wall, this is probably a good reason why. You need to nurture a company-wide sales culture where everyone understands that they are in sales, regardless of their actual title.

It doesn’t mean everyone is out banging on doors every day, but designers, creative directors, copywriters, strategists, developers, the finance manager, and the receptionist - they all do something special that moves a client a little closer to that magical word: “yes”.

Getting everyone in the company to think about how they’re part of your sales funnel has other benefits besides just direct financial ones:

Builds a sense of teamwork - A we’re-all-in-this-together culture will help your employees feel more engaged with your company overall, and more appreciative of each other’s role. If business is down there can be no finger pointing, everyone needs to work harder. And when a win comes in, you all celebrate together.

New solutions - By involving all your employees in thinking about where to find new opportunities, new ways to pitch a lead, or new approaches to retaining clients, you may discover creative and diverse ideas. What’s the saying, “Twenty-two heads are better than one?”

Build brand - With more of your people talking about your company - what you do, how you do it, who you do it for - in their own social and professional circles, you’re extending your reach. And what better brand ambassadors than your own employees?

Here’s how to build a company-wide sales culture that will have your bottom line begging for more:

1. Understand skill sets

Maybe someone on the design team is a whiz at presenting creative ideas that could win over a potential client, your account manager is confident he can turn his knowledge of PPC into a new service offering, or your developer used to build mobile apps for big brands.

I once worked for a small agency as an account manager for about a year, filling in for someone’s maternity leave. I was hired directly by the agency owner but somehow he forgot or missed that in my previous agency job, I had done copywriting for some major brands.

A big pitch to a new client was coming up and copywriting was needed. The agency owner asked me to source some outside contractors we could use (they didn’t have someone in-house at the time). He was fretting about whether or not we would be able to service this client and what the costs would be. 

When I cautiously reminded him that I had experience in this, I could handle the work, and we could keep it all in-house his confidence in the success of the pitch rose. He also started talking about other opportunities we could go after now that he knew I could write.

As a leader in your business, you should be familiar with the skill set of all your employees. This is really important when creating a sales culture. You need to know where opportunities lie within your own resources for upselling and cross-selling.

2. Everybody is a somebody to sales

People who don’t consider themselves directly in “sales” often need help seeing the connection between their role and closing more deals.

The way the receptionist greets a new client, finance deals with invoices, the design of the pitch deck, the attitude of account service, the strategy presented, and the quality of your portfolio, all of these touch points add up and contribute to whether your lead decides to say yes or no to your company over the competition.

Make sure everyone understands that what they do specifically is important to the ongoing growth and success of your agency and how that in turn translates into sales.

3. Understand the mission (and choose to accept it)

To really activate your new sales force and maximize their potential, you need to be sure that everyone in your company knows what you’re trying to accomplish.

They need to know:

• The services/solutions you offer
• Your ideal client fit
• Your ideal project type
• Your company’s value proposition over your competition
• Who the competition is and what they offer
• Lines of accountability
• The goals and objectives of the company
• How to communicate these points to clients

You’d be surprised how everyone in your office might have a different view on these points so it’s important that you’re all singing from the same song book if you want to cultivate worthwhile leads and not waste time.

4. Recognize an Opportunity

While you don’t need to make everyone in your office read Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale, teaching them how to recognize an opportunity can go a long way in boosting lead generation.

Whether it’s a conversation at the rink with a parent whose law firm needs a new website, or the perfect opening with an existing client to cross-sell them on another service, everyone should be able to spot the ideal time to mention your company and what you do.

That team member isn’t necessarily the one to close that deal but learning how and when to say, “Our company has a lot of experience with that. Can I get someone from the office to follow up with you?” or whatever your process is, could reap warm new leads.

5. Let everyone in on a lead

Sharing your leads and sales funnel with everyone in the office could open up doors you didn’t know existed.

Maybe it turns out your developer has a cousin who works at a prospective business who can influence a meeting, or it’s a pitch for a specialized industry your copywriter used to work in during her last gig, or your digital strategist created online campaigns for your lead’s competition.

One idea is to get a list of all the clients and industries your employees have worked on in the past. You may know what they’ve worked on while they’ve been under your roof but they’ve likely worked for other firms and other clients.

Keeping your people in the loop could uncover that tipping point that moves the deal one step closer to a close.

6. Pitches are as important as projects

And vice versa.

It’s not just your sales reps who are responsible for that pitch or proposal - you need it well-designed, well-written, and with a kick-ass strategy. This takes the input of multiple people on your team: designers, writers, creative directors, marketers.

Chances are these folks are super busy with client work already in the pipeline but they need to understand it’s as much their job to perfect a proposal as it is to knock a project out of the park.

At the same time the promise of the new and sparkly potential-client shouldn’t override the importance of finishing quality, on-time, great work for existing clients. Making existing clients happy is part of sales!

Don’t forget that the average close rate for selling to existing clients is 60-70% compared to only 5-20% for new clients. 

7. Kill the status quo

If you’re going to bring new people into the sales process, you need to be open to their ideas and their questions.

Fight the urge of “we’ve always done it this way” because you’ll kill their enthusiasm and miss out on the potential for innovative new ways at looking at the same problem - how to close more deals. Try new stuff, see if it works, adjust as necessary. But keep the dialogue open-minded, respectful, and results-focused.

8. Respect the sales team

Your existing sales team might tend towards feeling a bit defensive or protective of their “turf” when it first comes to empowering a company-wide sales culture. They may feel this is a reflection on their ability to do their job or that they’re going to lose out on commissions.  

Position this shift as a way to make their job easier. They’re still going to be cultivating leads and moving them through the sales funnel but now they’re going to have more support in doing that. More support to close more deals and more appreciation for the job they’re doing.

If done right, this culture shift will eliminate any ‘us vs them’ attitude that sometimes exists between sales and the rest of the company.

Conclusion

Isolating your sales team and their activities from the rest of your business will only isolate your opportunities for growth.

By nurturing an inclusive company-wide sales culture, your opportunities will expand into the social and professional connections of your staff, and benefit from their creativity, skills, and experience to close more deals.

The Proposify team’s been busy revamping some old features, designing, developing, and testing some new ones, and fixing up some pesky bugs. I’ve got lots to tell you about that’s new and improved!

Get Metrics Faster

Before this release, our metrics were compiled every 24 hours. While they did provide great insight to the sales process, it simply wasn’t fast enough in today’s lightning speed marketplace.

Our View Metrics, which includes who viewed your proposal, which sections they viewed, and the length of time they spent looking at each section, is now calculated every 5 minutes. Our Business Metrics displays the status of your proposals and what’s in your pipeline as fast as you win new business.

One of my favorite new features is now when you view a snapshot of a proposal sent to your client you may see this:


In the top right corner you’ll see a message indicating that your client is viewing the proposal RIGHT NOW. So cool!

These updated metrics will help you reach out to clients faster and stay up-to-date in close to real time.

Custom Currency Formatting

Now in Proposify not only do you have control over which currency your proposal uses, but also how the currency displays:

       



You can set your account default format so that every proposal created uses this setting. Or you can override the currency formatting on a proposal by proposal basis.

This new feature will better help you communicate with your clients in their language, increasing your chances of closing the deal.

Pipeline & Metrics

We made a couple changes to how Pipeline and Metrics show proposal values and totals.

The Pipeline totals  now use your account default and are split by currencies, helping you truly understand what’s on the go.

The same change has been applied to your business metrics, so they reflect the currencies you are bidding for and winning.

Custom Date Formatting

Much like the currency formatting, being able to customize your proposal date format will help solidify your voice in your client's language.

Here’s how you set your default date formatting:

And how to set it per proposal:

Neat, right??

Quick Updates

Company Variables

New in this release is the ability to add your company information as variables in a proposal. This means if your phone number changes or your address, the change will be reflected in your proposals. You can insert the company variables like you do the others.

Zapier Update

Zapier just launched a new version and we quickly took advantage. Now when you create Zaps to your essential apps, you can send invoices directly from Proposify. You can also notify your CRM that the client has signed the proposal, keeping your applications up to date with your success.

New 30-day Trial Period

We’ve been discussing our trial lengths and based on customer feedback have decided that 14 days simply isn’t enough to allow people to get a full sense of the power of Proposify. So as of Monday, February 1st, 2016, we’re extending all existing and new trials to be 30 days long. The sales process doesn’t always happen over night so we want to be there with you when you win your first proposal ;)

Upcoming Features

Permissions Feature

We are continuing development on the Permissions feature. We are very excited by it and know you are going to love the added control.

Revamped Mobile Views

We’re working on improving client previews on mobile so they’re more effective. Not only are we refining the existing features in the preview, we’re also adding in mobile comments so you can discuss the status of a proposal on the go.

Live Long and Proposify,
Ricky Ferris
Product Manager

There are great reasons to build an internal product on the side.

It can be a way to learn new technology or flex your creative muscles without clients demanding changes.

It can solve a need in the market and eventually become a profitable business.

Still, many digital agencies who attempt to follow the successful path of Basecamp (agency turned bootstrapped SaaS company) never get their projects off the ground. And even if they do, they give up on them.

There are a few reasons why internal products fail which I’ve written about before. In a nutshell, it comes down to having expectations that don’t fall in line with reality, and not having the resources or the stamina to carry the project out for the long haul.

So if you’re serious about launching a product that could one day become your business, then ignore these steps at your own peril:

1. Spend at least two months validating your idea

You’ve got a great idea for an app. Awesome! It can be tempting to jump in head first and start mocking up your idea or writing the first lines of code.

However, unless this is a fun side project you never expect will see the light of day, there are steps you need to take before embarking on a risky and expensive business endeavor.

You need to validate your idea to make sure you’re solving a real problem for a large, paying market of customers.

How do you go about validating?

For the purposes of example in this blog post, I’m going to use an old idea for an app I had that never went anywhere called Saucr.

Here’s the idea behind Saucr: it’s a way for agency operators to ensure their staff are 80-90% billable, and be able to foresee 90 days in advance if there’s an overflow of work in the schedule. It picks up the overflow, like a saucer. Get it?

This way, you can see over a 90 day period if you have more client work coming in than staff to accommodate it so you can prepare by either subcontracting or hiring new talent. Or, you can also see if there isn’t enough work coming in and you’ll need to either get new business in the door or make layoffs.

Let’s say I was serious about getting this idea off the ground, what would I do next?

Customer development

This is so simple but few people actually do it.

Talk to people.

No matter how good an idea I think Saucr is, I need to remember that it’s only a hypothesis, even if I experience the problem first hand.

Here’s my hypothesis: 

I believe that companies that sell project-based work don’t have enough information to make long term decisions.

Operators run into bottlenecks where there are too many projects and they don’t have enough staff to execute them, or they have dry periods coming up where their staff aren’t at least 80% billable.

I believe if operators had a visual way to see 90 days into the future it would help them plan for growth, sales, or downsizing and reduce their risk. I believe they would pay for this solution.

Since my target customers are agencies, the first thing I’d do is start making a list, either in a spreadsheet or CRM, of every agency in my city and find out through LinkedIn who is in charge of overseeing operations.

In a very small company that would likely be the owner, or in a slightly larger company they may have a director of operations.

I’d want to fill my list with 100 contacts and call each of them. If you can’t reach them by phone then leave a voicemail and follow up with an email. This is what my phone script would be:

This script does a few things:

• It lets them know right off the bat that you’re not calling to sell them anything
• You are thinking about something to help them with a problem
• You just want their feedback and they can offer it in whatever way suits them

If they agree to answer the questions, then have them written down and ready to go. If they don’t have time ask them if you can email them the questions and if they will respond.

You want to treat this as a research project to collect data, so don’t start by telling them about your idea. Even if they say they like it, that’s not helpful feedback at this point. It’s only going to bias your data and make it unreliable.

Instead zero in on the problem. This would be my list of questions:

• Do you ever put together projections in advance to determine how many projects are coming in and how many in-house resources you have to fulfill the projects?
• How do you currently calculate your staff hours to and plan the time they need to spend on client projects?
• How far in advance do you plan?
• On a scale of 1-10 how time consuming or difficult is it to put together these plans?
• What problems could arise if you don’t put together this plan?
• Would you pay for a software solution that takes this problem away?
• How much would you pay?

See if you can get anywhere near 100 of these calls. Put each of the answers in a spreadsheet and compare them when you’re done.

Caveat: If you’re building a solution for competing agencies they may be hesitant to offer you any information. This actually happened to me when I was calling local agencies about Proposify.

If you’re building a solution for competing companies, you may want to expand your research to those outside your area and assure them their feedback is confidential.

Create a Lean Canvas

Let’s assume the data you collected backs up your hypothesis: that agency operators want/need a better way to foresee overflow in their employees’ time and they will pay for a solution.

Next, what you’ll want to do is put together a basic business plan. I’m not talking about a long winded, text heavy business plan, just an outline to help you understand what you’re building and why it matters.

If you’ve never heard of Lean Canvas, I’d recommend checking that out, and creating a canvas yourself.

At the very least, write a short paragraph or two under the following headings:

• Pain - Show that you understand your customers pain on a deep level.
• Solution - What is the idea and how do you solve the problem?
• Market - What industry are you targeting and how big is it? Who is your customer persona? How do they buy?
• Business Model - How do you make money? How do you acquire customers?
• Competition - What is the alternative to using your software? It could be a direct competitor, or even another workaround (spreadsheets). What are common rebuttals to using your software?
• Special Sauce - How is your approach to solving the problem unique? What is your unfair advantage?

The validation process is time consuming, and people often skip it and go right to building their idea.

But taking the time upfront now to run a sanity test ensures you are building something that doesn’t exist (or at least exist the way you envision it), people want it and will pay for it, and there’s a big enough market to grow.

2. Hire a dedicated team

Most agencies start internal products the same way. They assign a designer and developer to work on it, and they announce that they’re going to treat it like its own client with its own budget.

What happens eventually? The project loses steam because there isn’t a client holding their hands to the fire, and paying client work pushes it out of the way.

As Paul Boag wrote when he closed down his agency’s internal product, Get Sign Off:

“Part of the problem is that our project managers have targets to invoice each month. Because Get Sign Off wasn’t a paying client it was pushed down the priority list. It wasn’t going to help the project managers meet their targets.”

From my own experience, Proposify was an idea I’d had since 2007. We didn’t start working on it in our agency until around 2011, and by late 2012 it was still vaporware for exactly the same reasons stated above.

It wasn’t until we secured a grant to hire a developer that we were able to get it off the ground.

If your agency is consistently profitable, you can invest your own money into the salary of the person you hire. But it’s a risky move if you get into a situation where you need to use that profit you set aside to keep from going belly up during lean months.

In our case, getting a grant from ACOA to hire a developer for a year was the best-case scenario. Depending on where you live, there may be similar options through your local government or economic development agency.

If you don’t live in a country, state, or province where government grants are available, you can pitch angel investors for cash to get your idea off the ground. Just make sure you have a solid pitch deck, you understand your market, and you really are committed to working on the product for years.

Whatever financial avenue you choose, there is no substitute for having at least one dedicated developer on the product at all times. Additionally, you should have a product manager, designer, customer support agent, and marketer working on it, but in the early days you will likely be the one wearing all those hats.

3. Launch your MVP in four months or less

MVP stands for Minimal Viable Product. It’s the very first thing you launch to beta users.

Despite what you want to believe, know that the first version of what you launch is going to suck. It will not be good. People will not understand the UI. There will be crippling bugs. But that’s OK.

The biggest danger to a startup is waiting too long to launch. The more time that goes by the less chance you’ll have to succeed, because you won’t be collecting feedback, and if you wait years to launch then the market may move on without you.

I came across this Facebook post on a startup chat recently:

Most of the comments were pretty harsh on this entrepreneur, and rightfully so. He talked about raising money, differentiating, and a lot of other problems.

But the biggest problem was staring him in the face: He didn’t launch anything for 2.5 years and didn’t plan to for another year!

Your product will never be “ready” and it will never be “done”, so just get something out there.

Looking back at what we launched in April 2013, Proposify (or Pitch Perfect as we called it at the time) was a very ugly, clunky product. Nobody would use it for long, let alone pay for it.

It’s embarrassing to look at now, but I’m still glad that we launched it when we did instead of waiting.

Waiting would have meant waiting longer to get feedback from users, which is completely the goal of an MVP. You aren’t taking over the world at this point.

4. Start marketing long before launch day

You should begin marketing your product long before you launch your MVP.

The goal is to start building an email list of people who are interested in your product, so you can build traffic and momentum.

Design a landing page

The first step is to set up a coming soon page that addresses your users’ pain and how your app solves it. Keep it simple, show off a bit of your product’s design and provide a clear call-to-action for them to sign up.

It’s OK if you don’t have the product ready, just collect email addresses from interested people so they can be notified when you launch.

At the beginning you should drive a little bit of paid traffic to the page. The goal isn’t to grow the business at this point, it’s just to build momentum, learn what keywords your audience is using to search, how much the keywords cost, and get an idea of how much volume paid traffic can get you.

Encourage sharing

Pre-launch products have the rare opportunity of building anticipation about something that doesn’t yet exist.

When someone signs up to be notified when you launch, you should encourage them to share the page with their friends, even offering them an incentive of moving higher up the list based on the more they share.

Neil Patel and Hiten Shah are transforming Quicksprout from simply being a blog about online marketing to a software product. When you sign up to Quicksprout they tell you how many people are in front of you and only give you access if you invite five people.

Start blogging and outreach

Get a head start by blogging from day one. Writing helpful content for your ideal customer will help build a rapport and form a relationship with them, earning their trust.

Alex Turnbull candidly shared how he was able to drive significant growth for his startup, Groove, by crafting a thoughtful strategy around his own blog and by guest blogging on other sites.

Ross Simmonds, the blogger and marketer behind the content curation app, Crate, has this advice to share:

“Marketing your product before you’re live is a great way to establish buzz and ensure that your launch is a successful one.
Prior to launch, establish relationships with a few key influencers, bloggers or journalists who will tell your story on launch day. Encourage them to share on their own social channels, check you out on Product Hunt or even write a post about their experience as a beta user. All of these actions can add up to make your product launch successful.”

5. Gather feedback and iterate rapidly

Once your MVP is out there, you should be emailing and calling everyone on your beta list to get their feedback.

The hard part is that when your product is early stage and you don’t have a high volume of users who are pumped about your product, getting feedback is very difficult.

People are busy, and unless your app is solving a big problem for them from day one, getting deep insight will be hard.

So what do you do?

User testing to the rescue!

If you build software for clients you may already have a UX process in place, but UX can be an easy thing to push aside when it’s your own baby.

Even if you get a lot of feedback from users interested in your product, they aren’t going to tell you everything you need to know. That’s why you need to perform user testing and actually watch people using the product.

UserTesting.com is a great option for this, because they’ll source the users for you.

First narrow down what kind of users you want and get at least five users to test.

Tell users where to start and give them a list of actions to perform.

Watch the videos to see where they fumble around or get confused. Make notes of things they say as they are using the product.

Once you’re done, put all the users into a column on a spreadsheet. List the issues they came across as a row. If a user came across that issue, put a score in their cell (1 out of 5). 

Total how many users ran into the same issue, so that the issues more users encountered contain a higher score than issues only one or two users experienced.

Here's a link to a sample test spreadsheet

This method may not give you insight into your market or customer persona, but at this stage just getting something in place that people understand and doesn’t break is the most important thing.

You can always build new features but the foundation should be simple and usable, even if it has a long way to go.

Implement other tools

There are two important tools to get into place from the get-go: analytics and customer support.

Customer Support: It should be dead simple for users to offer feedback while they’re in your app. I recommend signing up for Groove and adding their support widget to your app.

This gives you the added benefit of having all your customer support tickets go into one place instead of getting lost in an inbox.

Analytics: In addition to lots of qualitative feedback (emails, surveys), you need some quantitative feedback to learn what users aren’t telling you.

Using a tool like Heap will automatically track every action a user takes so you can analyse it and learn what parts of your product they use the most.

Heap offers 5,000 sessions per month for free, so it’s a good option if you want to keep your costs to a minimum when you don’t have very many users.

Use all the data you collect to iterate rapidly every week or two, adding features and fixes. Then repeat the process until you begin reaching product-market fit.

Creating a product people love and pay for is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. That’s why you need to have a dedicated team building it, and why you need to keep working on it long after it’s launched.

Conclusion

If all of this sounds like a lot of work, it’s because it is.

But if building a successful software business was easy, everyone would do it. The key is to start off on the right foot and be prepared to invest a lot of time and effort on achieving product-market fit, which can take well over a year.

If done right, you can build an internal product to supplement your agency business or even overtake it completely in time. For me it was a long, painful slog that’s been well worth the time and effort.