Perfecting your sales pitch as a digital marketing freelancer
A beginner’s guide to get contracts coming your way!
In a previous article, we looked at setting your prices as a digital marketing freelancer setting shop (you can find the article here). This article is about the next part of your action plan: how to effectively prepare and deliver your sales pitch.
Let’s dive in with a few prerequisites, a recap of the content of your first contact with your potential customer and the pitch that follows to win the contract.
STEP 1 : THE PREREQUISITES
Take in account the disparity in digital awareness in your future potential clients
During your time as a freelancer, you will face many clients with different expectations but, most of all, with different levels of digital understanding. Practising your sales pitch should be about being able to transmit what you do — whether you are explaining it to your grandma (grandmas are the best) or your tech-savvy Gen Z little brother. Vocabulary, tone, visual support and examples will all be different depending on the level of digital literacy of your audience.
An assumption that is often made is that successful and bigger companies will be more digitally aware compared to small businesses. However, if a company has had a very successful product over the past few years, they might not have even looked at new ways of attracting customers. Bigger companies might also have employees that have been in the business for a longer period and might not be open to change.
Small businesses, on the other hand, might be ready to learn and want to have a better digital marketing strategy as it is crucial for their development. They will also be more likely to have an “entrepreneur” mindset that will be easier to offer new ideas to. Other roadblocks might then need to be taken into account such as the price or the future development of the company.
That brings us to our second most important piece of advice as a prerequisite to prepare your sales pitch:
DO YOUR RESEARCH — no but, really, do it!
You might use plenty of different ways to get in touch with potential customers, from cold calls to networking events, but what you can do in advance is researching the companies or markets you will be targeting. Of course, you are not going to research every single company you have ever sent an email to, but you can research a particular sector and pinpoint a couple of key bits of information that you can use during that first encounter.
During the Covid crisis, a lot of digital agencies turned to small brick and mortar shops to help them digitalize quickly. In this case, learning about the reality of the situation by checking a few testimonies of business owners, researching the grants available from the government etc will be key information in your sales pitch.
MASTER the traditional marketing vs digital marketing fight - David and Goliath can be working hand in hand
In our last article, we covered this quote by Sophie Edwards : “there are still many people today that do not see the direct benefits of inbound digital marketing”. You will have to master all the ways traditional marketing weaknesses are balanced by digital marketing strengths and vice versa.
Reverting back to that extra value inbound marketing is providing will help you manoeuvre all the objections you might face. It is really about understanding the complimentary of both traditional methods and digital ones that will help tie in your pitch altogether.
A small business owner that only gets their clients by word-of-mouth is going to be proud of that, your job is not to explain to them how to do it differently, but how this method can be used digitally and build an even bigger customer base thanks to social media for example.
STEP 2 : YOUR FIRST CONTACT
That first discussion, whichever channel you decide to use, is crucial to hook the right customer for you. You are most likely to be pretty good at getting leads through digital levers so we won’t be covering that part but more the content of that first interaction.
Build rapport — but not too much
Building rapport is setting the tone for the interaction, you want to be stepping into that comfort zone with your interlocutor. To build rapport you can step into 3 types of roles in your words and tone according to Ed Stapleton Jr (Co-founder at Clicks Geek PPC advocate):
Be careful though as not all customers relate to small talk and might clearly see the selling relationship starting: depending on the situation it might even be better to just go straight to the point of that first interaction.
Ask A LOT of questions
This time is for you to get as much information as possible to be able to prepare your pitch for the next meeting. Build on your research and ask general questions at first: what is your brand about? How long have you been open? etc. You want to really get the essence of the company and the vision for the future from your interlocutor.
The second type of question will be about your area of expertise and how the business is currently attracting its customers. This will help you create a parallel in your pitch as discussed in the prerequisites.
Set up your storytelling
It is proven that people remember stories more than any statistics, so you should use this technique of storytelling for your pitch in the next phase and in that first interaction you might want to start with a few quick sentences on you or your expected results. However, remember that this interaction is about the potential client first.
STEP 3 : YOUR PITCH
Based on the information of the first 2 steps you will be able to create your pitch, remember it is as important as the value of your work especially at the beginning of your freelance career.
Answer the WHYs
According to Mike Harce, founder of GSD agency, your pitch is all about answering the 3 questions that your potential customer will ask themselves during your presentation:
Why do I need this?
Why now?
Why with him/her?
This will allow you to, instead of losing yourself in explanations, stay focused on the 3 reasons for a partnership with you and using your services.
Set up commitments
The second part of your pitch should be about committing and being very clear on what your service does and does not include. This is very important as you want to avoid “buyer’s regret” post-sale which would have a negative impact in the future. (Source: Mike Harce, founder of GSD agency)
You also have to make sure that the customer is understanding their commitment: for example, if you are a content creator and you agree with them to create four articles a month, they will have to commit to giving you the topics and right insights to be able to create good and efficient content.
Close the deal
In this last part, make sure you recap very clearly where and how you will intervene in the value chain of your customer’s product or service and what are the expected results. It is all about giving the customer a 360° vision of the future. This is the time to include past testimonies, use cases you have worked on or any other proof that you will be successful.
And Voilà! You are hopefully set to start your mission with your new customer. Everything that happens next is about making sure that this customer will refer you, which means that, with time, you will be able to spend more time on your skill and marketing job than with your sales hat on.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
