I’ve been off work cold turkey for 5 weeks with baby Fin.
I’m filtering back in this week, and my first job is clearing emails and calling back enquiries…
Except, since Dec 5th, I’ve received 66 requests to work with Design Hero.
Its pretty overwhelming,
but I won’t moan as it’s a good complaint to have.
Of those 66 that made an enquiry and were filtered into my design agency sales funnel
26 booked a call from a followup nurture sequence (automated).
Of those, 4 never showed up (they’ll get a nudge, also automated)
I expect to convert about 20% of the remaining 22 leads.
I only take on x4 clients per quarter, which means by the end of the week I’ll have enough work to keep me busy until Apr 2025
Plus whatever else comes in between now and April…
Damn. 🤯
So I’ve decided not to bother call them back and if feels pretty good.
Even just 3 years ago, I was struggling to get one client a month.
I’d call every lead I had one by one until l got a yes or a no…
I’d call them while walking the dog, while eating lunch, while doing chores, while making dinner 😅
And when I got hold of them, I was so keen for the work, they could smell the desperation through the phone,
And by god did that go against me:
Discounts, price gouging, extras, I did it all,
I was the biggest whore around if it meant I’d get the job 😂
And once you lower your prices once, that becomes your new baseline.
You have to do it for every single quote for that client from that point on.
This led to me taking on a lot of bad fit clients,
plus I was still on a constant hamster wheel scrambling for more work,
as the jobs I had weren’t making me enough money.
Now?
I get about 2 leads per day,
And my biggest problem is vetting:
I simply don’t have enough time to call them all back.
The ones who booked a call are action takers,
The ones who haven’t are tyre-kickers…
Not all of them.
Yes, a few good leads slip the net.
But that’s the thing about operating from a position of surplus leads;
Having surplus leads means I cherry pick the best projects with the highest budgets,
So I don’t need to take on as many projects,
Which means I can cherry pick the best projects,
With higher budgets,
So I don’t need as many projects
♻️♻️♻️ And so on, And so on.
Having a surplus of leads means I’m not worried about a feast and famine cycle.
It means I have lots of money left in the business, after paying myself, to invest in marketing.
It means it’s first come first served, so clients are more than happy to put money down to get started.
No more ghosting and guessing games 👻
This week I’ll be sharing an automated system I set up to generate consistent leads for my design business
This doesn’t happen overnight.
Hey, if your freelance business is young,
you say yes to everything that comes your way.
It’s just one of the three painful phases of freelancing.
If you’re still struggling to get enough work,
When you get a lead, you call them back now.
Don’t email, don’t text, don’t DM. Call.
A call is a live conversation and provides x1000 as many feedback loops as an email does.
feedback loops = learning.
learning = more sales.
Your sales call ticks a lot of boxes at the same time.
- You get feedback
- You learn the right things to say
- You build rapport
- You build trust
- You learn pain points
- You address objections
But you can’t just say yes to everything forever.
You will quickly reach a plateau where your time isn’t earning enough money.
Tim Ferris explains this best:
A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice
My problem was I was waiting for leads to come to me,
When I should have been building my own pipeline.
So I built a system to manage, nurture and handle my leads.
I refined it and honed it, and plugged the gaps.
And whereas before leads slipped through my fingers like water, now they pour into my lead funnel and come out the bottom as customers.
It didn’t happen overnight,
But I clawed my way into a position of surplus.
First the leads would drip in,
Then a trickle
Then a stream.
But most freelancers already have a network which they can use as a springboard they can use to start generating steady leads.
The system I use is built on Clickup, but it’ll work on notion, or Trello too.
It generates 20k/m of revenue for my business
And it’s fully automated, right up to the sales call,
As well as fully automated follow-up, nudges, and dormant lead reactivations,
Which means even my “👻 ghosted” leads often turn into a job 6 months later
And before you call me a braghole,
I’m fully aware leads is the No1 issue most freelancers are struggle with right now,
Which is why I’m giving the whole system away for free to subscribers on Life By Design.
The system, the automations, the nurture sequence,
Plus a video walkthrough on how to set it all up.
Whether you have lots of leads, or no leads,
you can start building a pipeline of steady leads now.
All I ask is that if you find this helpful, share and repost to help another freelancer.
Happy hunting, freelancers.
Set up a fully automated referral systemwhich generates 6 figures of leads on autopilot
Subscribe for instant access to lead generation system for freelancers.
