Welcome to another episode of Silence is Golden where Troy and Simon give away invaluable tips for your business.
This week’s topic is how to win proposals with the anti-follow up. We also bring you the latest news including Word Camp Europe, the winner of the Plugin-a-Palooza and ways to improve your website content.
Watch the Video
Stuff That Happened
Word Camp Europe
WordCamp Europe hosted a successful contributor day in Belgrade despite a wi-fi outage during the first half of the day. Get the low-down of the event in this article.
Plugin Detective Wins Plugin-a-Palooza
WordCamp Orange County, CA, took place this past weekend and the winner of the Plugin-a-Palooza was Plugin Detective. The plugin lets you know if something is wrong with your plugin installs and helps you investigate which one is at fault. It also disables plugins and helps you decide which ones are the right one to use. Find out more from WP Tavern.
4 Ways to Improve Your Site’s Content
If your client is asking why they aren't getting results from their web page, perhaps they need to have a look at their content. This is a great article on why content is the most important part of a website and how to improve it. If they don’t have the skills to write content then make sure you do it for them and charge them accordingly.
Muzzle – Silence Embarrassing Notifications
Check out this app! It automatically turns on Do Not Disturb when screen sharing starts so that personal text messages and notifications don't pop up in the middle of meetings with clients. The homepage is hilarious and a little shocking (which we love!)
This Pisses Me Off
What pisses Simon off this week is when people compare themselves to others. If you're looking at what everyone else is doing, remember – it is not real! It's their best-self portraying themselves on the internet.
The same applies when it comes to comparing your work to another's! Just don't do it, especially when it comes to pricing because there’s always someone willing to go broke faster than you!
Most importantly – you shouldn’t compare yourself from where you are today to someone else who is 5 years ahead of you.
Let’s Get Unstuck
This week we had a question about one of our YouTube videos on WordPress migration from Ante:
I see a disconnection when moving the design process into the WordPress environment. You can create the wireframes, but then how do you turn that into a finished design. You have a design and a theme so how do you then customise that and turn it into the design?
Simon says that it’s about hiring a developer. If you need to customise something, you need to hire someone who understands the theme framework that you’re using and how to turn the vision into a coded, functional reality.
(This topic started Troy on his rant about people who are using Photoshop to design websites… he may have even used the word “nincompoops”!).
The Golden Nugget
The Anti-Follow Up
Troy says that the anti-follow up is his “way of doing sales without being a douche”! In other words, it’s a way of keeping in touch with your clients without being pushy or needy.
Troy says that if you have put in a proposal, the worst thing you can do is call and ask if they’ve read it. They are probably just mulling it over because it is more expensive than anticipated. So you want to continue to nurture and educate them and let them come to you.
Simon says that he has found that sometimes they just haven’t had time to read the proposal, but following up with them doesn't remind them why you're the best person for the job.
If you have a proposal in the works, keep feeding them valuable information. For example, educate them on your SEO process. Troy tells us that one of his favourite emails to send is a checklist of all of the things you need to do before your site goes live. He shares this with his clients and tells them that, regardless of who they end up working with, to just make sure that these things are ticked off before the launch.
In the BluePrint course we give away many templates for these emails, but if you visit this post, you can download some free templates that we've pulled out of the course.
Tool of the Week
Active Campaign
Active Campaign allows you to set up a sequence of emails to send to your clients. Just remember to make sure that it is set up to send in the recipient's time zone, not on a weekend and space them 3 days apart.
Troy's Hot Tip
Use video in your anti-follow up and teach them something. This will position you as the expert and the client gets to know you.
Wrap Up
Now it's time to start writing up your email sequence so that they are all ready to go! Let us know what you think in the comments below, or share your story of a successful anti-follow up!
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