Building a Successful Sales Cycle for Designers
The journey that a potential lead goes through from learning about your business to becoming a paying client is incredibly important. Sometimes it can feel frustrating to spend so much time nurturing a lead just to have them decline a proposal, or worse… ghost you entirely. 👻
It’s important to be intentional at every step in your sales cycle in order to get the right leads in the door, and get them excited about working with you.
Let’s jump in and talk about how you can make your sales cycle more successful and get more (paying) clients!
When Does Your Sales Cycle Begin?
We tend to think that a person’s journey working with us starts when we get their first inquiry or email, but it’s really not the case! It all starts when they’re in need of a service or product and begin to wonder how to find the right company or person to help them.
The person will typically first ask their friends or community for recommendations, or search online to find a place that will provide their desired service, product or outcome.
Then they might interact with your business website, social media channels, or read reviews from other clients about YOU! If they like what they see (and they will!) they’ll take the next step in the client journey…perhaps reaching out to you via your inquiry form or provided email.
Hurray, this person is now a lead! Next up, your new lead will want some more information required for making their final decision to work with you. This might look like a consultation with you (paid or free - up to you!), project lookbooks, service menus, or proposals.
After the lead has all of the information they need, they’ll decide to work with you. And now, my friend, that lead is a client! 🙌
Stages of a Sales Cycle 🔄
Just to recap at this point, a client’s journey through a sales cycle typically looks like this:
💡 Awareness: lead becomes aware that they have a problem they need help solving.
🔍 Consideration: lead is asking their community for recommendations and doing online searching for the solution to their identified problem.
✅ Decision: lead is ready to make a decision in purchasing or hiring.
💰 Purchase: lead has now purchased from you and is an official client! Hurray!
🤝🏻 Retention: building relationships with your client keeps them loyal to your brand and retains them as an ongoing customer in your business.
👏🏻 Raving Fan: client is loving working with you and wants to know all the ways they can help you succeed and grow!
Ways to Build a More Successful Sales Cycle
It seems pretty simple, but there are a lot of gaps that potential leads fall through before they officially become a paying client. We want to catch those people and get them back on track by making the sales cycle as easy as possible for them. Here are some ideas to help you tighten up your own sales cycle.
😖 Don’t overcomplicate things
Have you ever talked with a rocket scientist about the rockets they’re building? Neither have we, but we assume they’re going to use a lot of words we don’t understand - and that’s okay! They’ll change their lingo to help us better comprehend their work, and that’s exactly what you should do for your clients.
Be sure you're speaking the language of your ideal clients - they may not know what pixels, vectors, or InDesign is. Remember to meet your audience where they are, and make them feel comfortable so that they understand what’s going on and feel confident in making the right choices. This helps build more immediate trust too.
🙌 Help them, don’t sell to them
Design services are great - they make things look good and obviously we’re big fans of that. But they also help solve your clients' problems. Good design helps attract the right people to a business, keeps people interested, motivates people to take action, communicates to people effectively, and improves engagement rates.
Work to solve a potential lead’s problems instead of selling your services. Be direct, but also focus on how good design will help your clients meet their goals. Share things like:
What results will they get?
What outcomes can they expect working with you?
What are you taking off their plate?
What problems are you solving for them?
👀 It’s all in the questions
Be sure to ask the right questions! Here are a few examples we’ll give you to get a jumpstart on writing your own:
What are your lead’s goals?
What outcomes are they hoping for while working with you?
What is their budget?
Have they worked with someone like you before? What went right, or wrong?
What hesitations are keeping them from starting work with you?
🧘♀️ Be flexible
Automation is wonderful, we know it. But so is personalization, and being a real, living, breathing human.
It’s a dreamy idea to imagine a sales cycle on total repeat without any needed effort on your end, but that’s not going to work very well. Have automations in place, like automatic reminders, auto-responses to emails or a client journey mapped out that you and your team follow, but also be flexible.
Don’t try to do a one-size-fits-all approach. People are different. Some people may be better suited to a phone call to go over your services, while others may be comfortable with email. It’s all personal preference, so listen to your leads and ask the right questions to communicate with them their way.
📂 Utilize templates
You don’t have all the time in the world to make each individual form and document for leads - neither do we. Put as much into a template as you can, and customize it from there. At Function, we use proposal templates and canned email responses for everything! But we also add our personal touch for each interaction, depending on the client or lead. It saves us from spending hours writing emails and forms, while allowing for personalization.
PS - WillowSpace is a great spot for templates and time-saving hacks for putting your sales cycle on repeat! You should check it out. 😉
WillowSpace can help your sales cycle go from blah 🥱 to awe 🤩
You love efficiency, and we love making your design business more efficient. It’s a match made in heaven! Sign up for WillowSpace today and watch your sales cycle become the best around. We’re so excited to work with you!
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