How to sell creative strategy to your clients easier
In my Freelancers Only! newsletter, I’ve been exploring and explaining how to sell strategy workshops as part of a content service offering. For years, I thought strategy was an overpriced, under-communicated offer that only made the client’s request more convoluted. Most of the time this is true. But since I learned how to sell strategy, I’ve realized that it’s an even better way to service a client—one they always thank me for afterward.
You can sign up for my newsletter to hear more about this in the coming weeks, but what I realized is that if strategy is sold by listing out hard deliverables (PDFs, reports, graphs, plans, etc.) and by listing out the labor it takes (days, meetings, hours, team members), clients have a much easier time seeing where their money goes. As Donald Miller says in his book Coach Builder, if you sell “content strategy” that’s like a restaurant selling “food items.” You make sales easier when your clients know exactly what they’re getting.
A thinker I enjoy named Blair Enns recently wrote about this topic on his blog, too. “Selling a diagnostic logically increases your odds of success” Enns says. “It’s easier for the client to commit to the briefer, less expensive diagnostic than it is to fully commit to the longer, more expensive project. It’s easier for the client to commit to the remainder of the project once they’ve worked with you on a diagnostic.”
This quote sums up my experience exactly. The creative service business is a trust-based business. If you’re looking to scale your business or expand your offerings, what makes you think your clients will automatically trust you can do that for them? The strategy process (or the “diagnostic” process, as Enns refers to it generally) shows your client that you know what they’re talking about, and helps them begin to imagine what life could be like if they integrated your strategy. And as we all know, once you can get the client to imagine their life with your service, that’s when sales become easy.
