Sales process and offer-fit discipline

When a buyer asks how much, the clock starts. Every minute, every email, every let me get back to you is friction.

Most businesses don't realize how slow they are at this. The form goes to marketing.

Marketing rouses the sales. Sales schedules a discovery call.

Three days out, discovery happens, then a follow up, then a proposal a week later. By the time a number lands in the buyer's inbox, they've already talked to two competitors.

The inherent step here isn't whether you share your pricing. It's how long you make a buyer wait to get a sense of fit.

The fix is simple. When someone asks about a price, give them a frame that day, a range, a starting point.

A here's what engagements like yours typically look like. Enough that the right buyer leans in and the wrong one walks before either of you waste a week.

So when someone asks what it costs, how long does it take your team to give them a useful answer? If it's longer than 24 hours, that's inherited.

Alright, cheers for the comment, Mike. So Mike is asking what's the best approach to find out why external images don't load or show as blank images.

This is what I would do in 30 seconds to get this resolved. First of all, external images means that your website is trying to load images from somebody else's website.

So either their server is saying no, or your browser is refusing to load those images. This is what I would do.

Load up the website that you're trying to check it on, right click anywhere, and then go to inspect. And then what you'll see is you get the inspector to load up.

What you wanna do is open up network. Now when you go to network, it might look like this.

If it looks empty, just click reload page, wait a second, and you'll see every single resource and file loading on that page. I would filter by image, and then what you're gonna see is every single image on that page listed here.

And what you'll see then is the status of every image. These are all showing 200, which means they've loaded.

So if you see 404, that means the image is gone...

e you've loaded the images as HTTP. Just double check and make sure that everything is using HTTPS.

Now one thing you can do is take the image URL and open it in a new tab. And if it loads, that means the issue is hotlinking because it'll be loading using their URL, but inside your website it's not loading.

One other thing I check, just to make sure, is that it's not some lazy loading plugin that you've got in that's just not triggering it. Could be that.

I doubt it, but it'd be worth checking. Always test an incognito window as well and see if that makes any difference because that will give you some indication whether it's your cache or not.

And the best fix really is to get the images onto your website so that you're loading them directly from your server and not relying on someone else. So hopefully that helps.

Give it a try. Let me know how you get on.

See you on the next one.

This year I've learnt possibly the most important word that has transformed my agency. Do you know what that word is?

No. In the past, any type of client that came our way I used to say yes to and we try sign them on and start working with them.

Any person that wanted a meeting with me, yes, sure, let's fit it in. Anything and everything that came my way I'd say yes to because obviously I was used to the hustle and I thought that's what I had to continue to do to grow.

But this year I took a step back, I said, you know what, thank god I've got a good successful digital marketing agency and I can be more selective with the type of clients and the type of meetings that I take. And you know what?

By doing that has transformed everything. Now when people contact me and they say, can we do business with you?

I'd say 80 to 85% of the times I'm saying no. They've got a type of a website that I don't think I can do any work with, I say no.

If they've got a business model that I don't like, I say no. If they're in a industry that I know from experience we've had no luck with, I say no...

I never send follow UPS to clients once I've done the proposal and I know that they've received it. Now, there's a few reasons why I don't do follow UPS.

No. 1, I'll think that if a person wants to do business with me, they've got my proposal, they know what my prices are and they know how to contact me.

No matter what I do, it's not gonna change that. The second thing is I don't want to come across as desperate.

I don't think anyone wants to do business with a desperate person. And I think majority of the times when people follow up, it comes across as desperate.

I don't want to get into the friend zone area with the client. Now with regards to the friend zone, you know what I mean with regards to relationships, but with regards to client supplier relationships as well, there is that friend zone.

What I mean by the friend zone is that you think, Ja, the guy is going to sign up with me and they string you along and string you along. No, I don't want to do that at all...

You need to stop charging your customers for shipping. Your customers do not wanna pay ВЈ24.99, plus ВЈ2.99 for shipping.

People hate shipping charges. It doesn't matter what way you dress it up, they immediately feel like they're not getting as good of a deal as soon as you whack that charge on.

As a business owner, you have two options to make this work significantly better for you and help improve your sales. First option, which is my favourite, is to incorporate the shipping cost into the product cost.

So instead of charging ВЈ24.99, you'll charge ВЈ27.99. If you're struggling to make your prices competitive with this approach, then you can have a free shipping threshold.

So free shipping if they spend ВЈ40 or if they buy two items. I guarantee you can make one of these work for your business and it's gonna improve your sales.