Turn More Quote Requests Into Clients By Implementing These 5 Systems

Brian: This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 132.

[00:00:19] Welcome back to another episode of the the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, and I'm here with another solo episode today.

[00:00:27] God. I hope you guys don't hate these. This is only like the second one I've ever done. I know Chris did a couple in the past and they're honestly hit or miss to me when I hear them on other podcasts that usually have hosts. So hopefully today's episode is a hit. Before we get into the topic today, I've got a very special announcement and that is, I am sick of my coronavirus spirit.

[00:00:46] For those who don't know, I've been growing my beard out since January 15th I have not even trim my beard. And my wife says, I now look like a civil war general. And I think that was the last straw for me. It's kind of annoying, like I want to keep growing it out. I have these cool like gray streaks that go down my goatee area, like my chin, and then the rest of it's black.

[00:01:08] So it's kind of badass. And we're an uncharted territory when it comes to my beard. Like I've never had a beard this long in my life, and it's just because this is the first time I've ever been quarantine. I've called it my quarantine beard, and I've called it my coronavirus spirit. I think I'm just gonna keep it a quarantine beard.

[00:01:22] And since quarantine is kind of over here in the USA for a lot of cities, a lot of States. For better or for worse, and things more for worse, honestly, but I'm not gonna get into that today. I feel like it's time to turn this thing up because I need my wife to still love me, but I just don't see myself ever getting this long again.

[00:01:38] I want to keep it going and just see what it looks like when it's like a foot long, but there's just no way I'm going to let this keep going. But you know what? This is a podcast, so it doesn't really matter what it looked like. You still love me with or without my beard. I think hopefully. Yeah. Let's just pretend that's the case.

[00:01:51] So today's episode, I want to talk to you about bottom of funnel. Before you hit the stop button, I want to clarify what I mean here. Couple of weeks ago, episode one 29 I talked about the middle of the funnel. That's where people send to screw up things the most, and that's typically on your website, if anyone's lost right now.

[00:02:09] Let me just really quickly recap. Top of funnel is creating awareness for your business. That's things like Facebook ads. Cold outreach, warm outreach, word of mouth advertising, things like that. Whatever generates any sort of awareness for your studio, middle of funnel, or the middle of your sales funnel is all about turning that awareness into interest.

[00:02:29] So someone actually reaching out with interest to work with you, and that's typically done through your website, although it can work on Instagram or Facebook as well. Or in person through text. And we talked about that on episode one 29 and once someone actually reaches out and expresses interest, now they're in the bottom of your funnel.

[00:02:44] And this is also a common weak point people have because they don't understand how to manage their leads on the bottom of their funnel. And just to kind of clarify some language here, a lead is just someone who is interested or expressed interest in working with you. You have some sort of contact information from them and you can follow up with them in some way, shape, or form.

[00:03:00] Typically that's an email address. If they fill out your contact form. Sometime I sent an Instagram message. If they message you on Instagram or any sort of social media, and there are specifically five areas I want to talk about in the bottom of your funnel that I think is worth optimizing. This is going to be a big picture approach.

[00:03:14] I'm not going to talk about the specifics of each of these five areas, but this will give you a good overview to make sure you have all of these five pieces in place and that you're not missing any of these things. The goal here is to improve your conversion rate between leads to customers, and you can calculate that really easily.

[00:03:29] Just look at any of the people that have reached out to you in the past month or two or three months or even year, and figure out what percentage of those people that reached out with interest actually paid you money became customers. So typically what I see in higher price projects, so the thousand dollars plus per project type studios around 25 30% up to 50% and sometimes even higher conversion rate from lead to sell, someone filled out a contact form or someone booked a call with me, you're scheduled a tour of my studio.

[00:03:57] Or message me on Instagram and I know that I'm going to close 25% or 30% of those, I mean 25 or 30% of those people are going to pay me money. The goal is if you're below that threshold, maybe you're in 10 or 15% or maybe you're even at 25 or 30% which I think is a good, healthy area, and you want to bump that up to 50% these five things will help you convert more leads to customers.

[00:04:16] So this episode is for you. If you struggle with that. The first bottom of funnel system to implement is a quote based system. I've talked about this extensively on the podcast. I've talked about it extensively inside of our profitable producer course community. I actually talked about it this morning on our coaching call.

[00:04:32] We had about 50 people on our group coaching calls this morning and we talked about it there. The quote based pricing still is the most effective way to turn leads into customers. And there's a couple of reasons for this, and I may have talked about this on episode one 29 cause this is kind of teetering on the edge between middle of funnel and bottom of funnel.

[00:04:50] This is that transition point that I think I talked about in episode one 29 but it's worth reiterating here. A quote based system is when someone has to contact you for a price quote. Or to get your rates if even if you have standard rates. The reason I like the system, the reason I see the system work time and time and time and time again for a lot of my students and for Chris Graham, my cohost, his studio blew up when he started doing quote based pricing.

[00:05:11] The reason this works so well is because it requires somebody to reach out to you to get pricing, and so you capture the lead in some way, shape, or form. Either they've texted you for pricing, they have messaged you on Instagram for pricing, or they have filled out your contact form asking for rates for your studio.

[00:05:26] And let me just paint a picture cause this is a good analogy or story to kind of give you a picture of what this looks like and why this is so effective. If you have your rates on your website publicly for people to see, and someone comes to your website who's interested in working with you, they're not quite ready, which is a lot of people, a lot of people start going price shopping months and months before they're ever ready to hire you.

[00:05:44] And they go to your site, they see your pricing and they think, cool, he's this much. And they disappear for the next three to five months to go finish their songs. When it comes time to actually hire somebody for whatever service it is that you offer, let's just say mixing services. When it comes time for them to hire someone, they ended up hiring someone else.

[00:05:59] Your competitor down the road. Now, why did they hire that person instead of you? It's because when that band or artist was ready to hire your competitor was who was top of mind. Now, why were they top of mind? It's because your competitor had quote based pricing that meant when that artist was shopping around for studios in the area or mixing engineers in the area who could work with that style of music.

[00:06:22] You went to your competitor's website. Everything on the site looked great, the portfolio was great, all the stuff from episode one 29 was implemented because he listens to this podcast and they reached out for a quote and now your competitor has that email address as a lead, and your competitor's been following up nicely with Go-Giver marketing is what I talk about.

[00:06:40] Go give her a marketing where they're adding value all along the way over the next three to five to six months as that artist is finishing up their album. Or their EAP or they're single and all the while the artist that came to your site has forgotten about you. They visited your site. Once they left, you had no idea they ever came and so you just lost that customer.

[00:06:59] That is why I like the quote based system the most is because you can capture the lead no matter where they are in the process. Someone who is price shopping is not quite ready to buy. They're just interested in looking out and seeing what's out there, what their options are, and if you don't capture the lead at that point, you can not follow up consistently throughout the time until they're ready to book.

[00:07:18] Furthermore, when you do a quote based pricing system that allows you to put them through a process, which we'll talk about later in this episode, put them through a process. Which puts them at ease, which makes them feel better about everything, which makes them understand how you work, removes all questions and doubts and objections, but you can't do that until they've contacted you.

[00:07:37] And if you have your prices publicly on your website, there's no need for me to contact you until they're ready to book. All that being said. That's just one awesome element of quote based pricing. The other is being able to price the project based on the value you are giving them instead of just a set standard rate.

[00:07:52] Maybe the client's gonna be a pain in the ass and you want to factor a little bit on top of that. Maybe they need some things that are way outside of your normal scope of work and you need to account for pricing. On top of that. Maybe you need to hire session musicians. Maybe you need to hire. Someone to fix the bad edits that they send your way.

[00:08:05] Maybe they know they need help with editing, but that's not a service you offer. So you need to subcontract that out. You never know what sort of intricacies the project can have until you've actually talked to them. And so by doing a quote based pricing, they're not seeing one price in your website. And then having sticker shock later on when you double the price because you find out all this sort of information that you didn't know before.

[00:08:24] So quote based pricing, hands down is the best way to do things. I seen the data to back it up. I've seen it all across different sorts of genres, sub genres, services. I've seen it in different industries, and if the only differentiating factor you have in your business is your low price, if all you're doing is competing with the other people in your area on price, then you've already lost.

[00:08:44] So if you don't have your pricing on your website and you lose a customer because of that. All they're doing is shopping for the lowest deal, the cheapest person, and that's not the ballpark I want our listeners to be playing in. That's the ball pit. We'll let all the, uh, the people who don't listen to this podcast, let them play in the ball pit with all the other people racing to the bottom of the prices.

[00:09:01] Our community is about creating fantastic work and charging accordingly. Knowing our value, delivering that value and charging accordingly. So that's system number one, quote based system or quote based pricing. The second system you need to implement in the bottom of your funnel is your payment systems.

[00:09:18] And this section is a lot easier to talk through, but I'm just making sure that you have been thinking through this stuff. One is your payment policies. What are those? Do you require a deposit upfront, 50% before you start the project, or maybe the 50% after you've done the first song? Do you require the entire payment upfront?

[00:09:34] Do you wait to get paid at the very end? This is not an area just to play fast and loose. You need to make sure you have standard policies here when it comes to your payment systems and that you are consistent with them all across the board. That way if a dispute comes up or something comes up, you don't have to question what sort of deal you had with this artist versus another artist.

[00:09:50] It's just the same standard policy all across the board, and this gets even more important as your schedule gets more and more booked out because the more clients you work with, the more important it is to have set policies like this. So that's the first part of payment systems. The second one is just thinking through how they're going to pay you.

[00:10:04] Are they going to pay you through file paths? Which by the way, we are about to launch a Zapier integration. So if you haven't signed up the file pass, go to file pass.com and get your free 14 day demo there. There's a little file pass pitch for you there. Are they gonna pay you through file pass? Are they gonna pay you through.

[00:10:19] A PayPal invoice or you, they going to pay you through a square card reader and their studio, or are they going to pay you with cash? What's the most efficient, easy way to get paid, both for you and for your client? And if it comes down to one payment platform that charges a lower fee than another one, but it means your client has to jump through hoops just to pay.

[00:10:36] You don't start to cheap out. Don't start to avoid fees just because you don't want to pay 2.9% to PayPal or Stripe. If that means your client has to find a routing number and a Swift number and an account number and then go to their bank, and why are you money just to avoid those fees. Don't make them jump through hoops.

[00:10:53] Just make it as easy as possible for them because the goal is not to save 2.9% on this project. The goal is for that client to be so impressed with every single step of the process of them working with you that they come back to you time and time and time and time again. So make sure when it comes to turning.

[00:11:09] That interest into income, this court request into income. You don't make them jump through hoops for any of this. Make it as seamless as possible. Again, you want to control the entire experience. You want it to fill professional. You want it to be a high end premium experience because again, you should be charging more than your competitors.

[00:11:26] You should be charging more than the people down the road because you put so much care and effort into doing what you do. You put so much thought and care into the processes behind how you treat every single client and collecting money is a big part of this. The third system is proposal systems. Was probably should have been second, but whatever.

[00:11:43] This goes hand in hand with the quote based system. When someone contacts you asking for a price, I am a huge proponent of making sure they get a high class proposal. I'm not going to go into the specifics or details here, a fact about this ad nauseum on the podcast before I talked about it in my webinar, I talk about it in the profitable producer course.

[00:12:00] I've talked about it in past coaching calls, but when someone asks a price, don't just send them an email reply that just says, Hey. I charged this. Here's what you get, here's what you don't get, and here's how you can pay. That's what most people do. It's not impressive. It's not high class. It's not high value.

[00:12:15] It's not premium. It doesn't feel like a high end experience. I want you to think through this entire process from start to finish. When someone reaches out to you to the end, when they are done with the project, every single step of their journey needs to be a well thought out, well planned, well curated experience.

[00:12:30] Not haphazard, not cheap, not gross and dirty high class, and this is where the high class proposal is most important. Needs to look good. It needs to explain the entire process of what they're going to get, what's in it for them, how much it's going to cost, what your policies are, what's included, what's not included.

[00:12:48] The system I recommend people use is better proposals. And the reason I like is, Hey, their templates are great. B, I have a template on that platform. If you go through my affiliate link, you actually get my high class proposal template in your account. Just go to better proposals.studio. That's my affiliate link.

[00:13:03] And the other cool part is it lets you collect your deposit in the proposal. So what happens is you send this high quality high class proposal out, they can read through it. They are full comfort in confidence knowing that they are well taken care of because you so well laid out. Everything in the process of what they can expect when working with you and they can sign the proposal right there, see the deposit amount, pay the deposit or the full amount if you want.

[00:13:28] It can be done from their mobile device. So high class proposal. Very highly recommended part of a good sales process for the bottom of funnel and whatever better proposals charges right now for that service. It is vastly under priced because you will see a noticeable uptick in your conversion rates from quote requests to paid projects and you, when you actually sit down and do the math on how much extra income that brings you, especially for you, higher earners, people do in 2030 40 $50,000 a year and more.

[00:13:54] This is where that sort of thing is an absolute no brainer. The ROI on a piece of software like that is. Many, many multiples of what you're paying. All right. The fourth system you need in place for the bottom of your funnel is your followup system. Another thing we've talked about a lot on this podcast, but it's worth reiterating, but there's two types of followup systems that I want you to implement.

[00:14:13] Everyone should have a short term followup that's anywhere from the 30 to a 60 to a 90 day followup, and this is the process you send someone through whenever they have filled out your quote request form or asked about a price for your studio. And this is just. Consistently following up over a 60 day period in a certain specific way, which if you want to go to follow up.guide, that's my URL for a guide I have for a 60 day followup process.

[00:14:40] It's like a free ebook I give away. Just go read that, implement that, and you'll be good to go. When it comes to your 60 day followup, again, the whole thought behind it is a following up until you get a yes or a no cause that's where most of your income is going to come from, is the followup and then be staying top of mind until they are ready to book.

[00:14:55] So that's the 60 days short term. Follow up process. The second follow up process is the post purchase follow up process. This is when someone has paid you, you have fulfilled the work, the work is done. You should have a followup process in place after the project is over. That accomplishes a few things.

[00:15:11] One, it needs to make sure they're happy with the end product that you gave them, and if so, hopefully taking that as using whatever they say back to you when you follow up and ask how happy they are with everything. You can use that as a testimonial or you can ask them to copy and paste that into our view on Google.

[00:15:25] We talked about that on episode five of the podcast. Go back and listen to that about how to get more reviews for Google and Facebook. Your post purchase follow up process should also check in once their music has been released. Just to congratulate them on their release. Hopefully you have shared the music yourself somewhere on your social media channels, and it just keeps you top of mind and shows that you give a damn about the artist.

[00:15:45] And then the third goal with your longterm post-purchase followup processes of mouthful is staying top of mind so that when it's time for them to book again, you are still there keeping the relationship alive and you haven't just faded away to non-existence. And this doesn't mean following up every day or every week, or really even every month after you get past the first initial period.

[00:16:05] It could be that you follow up six months or seven months or 10 months, or even a year after they finished the project. The goal is to, as soon as they start working on new music, you want to show back up in their lives. If you can add any value between the end of the project and the start of the next project, any value you add is only going to add to the likelihood that they actually work with you.

[00:16:24] Again, this all goes back to our whole methodology behind Go-Giver marketing. If you haven't already, go buy the book off Amazon right now, the go giver and you understand what I mean? If you are wondering how in the hell I'm supposed to keep up with all of my clients. All of my leads for these 60 day follow ups, these longterm post-purchase follow followup series.

[00:16:43] That is where your CRM is going to come in handy. I recommend pipe drive. That's where I'd put all my followup reminders and it makes it really, really easy to keep track of all of that stuff. You can even automate some of that if you use clothes.com you can also put people in auto responders. I don't think pipe drive has auto responders.

[00:16:59] Let me look this up. Actually. Never look it up. It seems to be some way. High draft has automation, so you can actually automate some of these follow up emails so you can have things that trigger follow up emails and make this whole process a little bit easier. But no matter what sort of system you use, make sure you have something in place to keep track with your leads and your customers for both the short term followup and the longterm followup.

[00:17:20] And again, pipe drive is what I use. If you want to use pipe drive, I have an affiliate link for that. It doubles your free trial length. So if you want to use that, it's pipe drive.studio. Alright. So now we're on the fifth and final area of your bottom of funnel processes or processes, and that is the sales process.

[00:17:37] People fall into two different traps when it comes to sales for their studio. One of the traps are trying to close everything over email. And it depends on what sort of client you work with. If you're working with a lot of younger clients that don't want to get on the phone, it kind of makes sense to try to do that, but in almost all cases, getting on the phone or zoom is the easiest way to close a project, especially higher price projects.

[00:17:58] If you're like a mastering engineer and you're only working with like one to $300 projects, it is really difficult to schedule time to have calls with people before you book them. But if when you start getting to the thousand dollar plus range, especially the $2,000 plus range, when you're into these bigger projects, it is almost a 100% necessity.

[00:18:16] So it's like a 95% necessity to get on the phone for those sorts of projects because there's so much at stake there. The more money there is, the higher touch the sale needs to be, and that's where we get this mistake number two that people run into and that is just winging it. They get on a phone call and they're just chatting.

[00:18:32] They're just answering questions. And they think they've crushed it and all of a sudden they don't get the project. That's because they don't have any sort of sales process. They're not thinking through what goes into closing a two to three to four to $5,000 deal on the phone. It's not as easy as just answering questions because a lot of the times the client doesn't know what sort of questions even ask.

[00:18:51] They don't even know why they have a hesitancy to booking you. They just know something feels off and then they don't work with you. They work with someone else. So maybe I'll have another podcast in the future about the actual sales conversation cause that's a whole other topic. That's an area I don't want to dive into right the second, because this is again just an overview episode for each of these systems.

[00:19:08] It's not a deep dive, but one thing I want to talk about when it comes to having good sales conversations is to map out an outline and follow it as best you can. Again, don't try to be too rigid on the phone. Don't try to follow some. Super rigid process that doesn't make sense for the needs of that client.

[00:19:23] Be as flexible as you need to be with that client, but also don't just let them drift the conversation wherever they want it to go. I talked about having full control over the entire experience of the client. That also means making sure the client doesn't derail their own experience to their own detriment.

[00:19:37] So if you have a good checklist or outline you'd like to follow on the phone, a good process that discusses. Specific points that address their needs, their wants, their desires, where they are now, where they want to be, what is it going to take to get them to where they want to be? All of these things are important to discuss, understanding what objections they might have.

[00:19:56] Bringing those objections up and having really good ways that you crush those objections. If you charge twice what your competitor charges. Have a very good reason for that. If your turnaround time takes twice what your competitor takes, have a really good reason for that. As long as you have good reasons for things that may be turn off to them, you would be surprised at how understanding people can be.

[00:20:15] If you have a really good excuse for it. If you say, Hey, I spend three times as long on your tracks. I don't use templates when it comes to mixing, I make sure every single thing is a bespoke custom mix. This is one of my friend's pitches. They don't do template mixing. They don't do speed mixing. All they do is brand new.

[00:20:32] Template from scratch every single time for every single mix they do, and they crush it. It takes them forever, but they also charge more than the average person. That's because that's the way they want to work. That's part of his methodology. It's really appealing to the type of customer who doesn't want a cookie cutter template mix that someone else might want.

[00:20:49] And so again, knowing your customer, knowing what they want is a huge part of making sure you're closing these bigger ticket sales, these higher price sales. But the worst thing you can do is get on the phone and just meander the conversation, drag it out for an hour or two hours. With no real purpose.

[00:21:03] Make sure you have some sort of checklist and above all it's just make sure you get on the damn phone. That is the thing that I can't get across here enough. Get on the phone with people cause it's really easy to misread somebody's tone in an email or a text. To misunderstand something that's maybe a complex thing to explain, to lose that human to human connection that you get on these face-to-face zoom calls or ear to ear real time conversations.

[00:21:26] And by the way, if you use a proposal, make sure you sequence these things in order. Unlike what I did for this episode, I kind of rushed it by this episode together last minute, but make sure you put these five systems together in the right order. It should be quote requests first. Then get on the phone, make sure you completely understand the needs of the project.

[00:21:45] When you have an understanding and an agreement, then send them a proposal, then follow up with them and then use your payment systems to collect payment, and then you have the longterm post-purchase followup sequence. For the next six to 12 months. That's basically everything in a nutshell. If you have any questions about bottom of funnel or middle of funnel or even top of funnel stuff, just go to our Facebook community.

[00:22:05] I'm in there answering questions as much as I can, although honestly, I have Facebook notifications turned off on my phone completely, but just tag me in a post and I'll definitely see it. And you can get to that Facebook community by going to the six figure home studio community. Just search for that on Facebook, or you can just go to the six figure home, studio.com/community and that will forge you to our Facebook group.

[00:22:25] That's all I have on this episode. Until next time, thank you so much for listening and happy hustling.