Empower your research and development with automated selling for R&D

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there are many ways to skinny cat that's what I was told in high school by my teachers who didn't want to tell me I was exactly wrong but my answers were a little bit creative in this video I'm going to be going through how I sell my Automation Services in my company knock-on I'm also going to go through what I've done in the past and why it didn't work well for me I have sold many different products since I started my agency I sold done for you I sold done with you I'd sold done alongside view you name it I've sold it however I kept chopping and changing when my offer changed and nothing really stuck until I kind of tried them all so before I even get into this make sure you have your offer down pat but the first way I started selling automation was doing giant Giga builds now this was in the early days of my automation company I knew I had a niche skill set so what I would do is I would meet with clients I would talk to them about the issues that they're currently having in their business what they want to accomplish and then I would like a doctor I would prescribe a massive list of things that can be done to fix it and they they were happy to move ahead because it was fixing their problems but for me it was a massive project now the benefits of this I would charge up front so I would get a couple of thousand dollars deposited into my bank account and then I would start working and because these were such large projects I would focus all of my time onto it so it would be a month-long Endeavor of me working on this one project day after day so whilst this was great for the project it really hurt the rest of my business and the reason is because I didn't have any time put away to prospect Network or generate leads for the next coming project or the next coming month and I was never going to be able to grow this way I wasn't going to be able to scale I wasn't going to take on more clients at the same time because I was only doing one for one one month one project so the biggest issue there was rolling sales and if I didn't have that massive High ticket project I would be without any Revenue at all which led me to number two and that's using retaining I'd wisened up about three months into my agency and this is also when I started using go high level so I wasn't doing doing singular builds anymore and I wasn't just focusing on massive projects I was like right I need to start getting people on a monthly basis so I can have some kind of predictability and have reoccurring Revenue in my business so I stopped once off costs entirely and just went straight into a retainer model now the pros of this were great I was able to sign people up without much hesitation because I wasn't charging very much and there was no contract or commitment from people I had Clarity on the revenue that I was generating each month and I could allocate costs to running costs and have like a spreadsheet of money coming in so I knew what bills to pay that kind of thing essentially it allowed me to plan now doing it this way there were a few cons because I was kind of desperate to sign up clients onto this new model I was getting onto sales calls and just listening to what people had to say and then I was just saying yes so I was taking on anyone and everyone that I could now this isn't bad and in the beginning you want to work with a broad amount of people so that you can get as much experience as possible but it led to me setting a culture of me saying yes to everything so after the sales call and they'd signed up like a month in if they wanted to something new done they would come to me and say hey we want to do this and I would just say yes without actually charging any more money so I was giving off this impression that I will do everything for you for 300 a month which is very low and the scope kept getting larger and larger and the project and the hours that I allocated to each client got larger and larger as well more work no extra money one thing I also didn't have I had no longer had influxes of money coming into my business as well so what this meant was I wasn't able to take risks and invest in on myself or invest in new tools quickly because I had to wait for each month the revenue to start generating so taking away the lump sums really impacted my ability to make big decisions quickly because the more money you have the more leverage you have and I was lacking leverage at that point in time so I had to use my time instead of money as leverage this leads me to number three and this is where I currently am at and it is something that I'm really happy with because I've kind of perfected it I've implemented a build fee so an upfront cost and then after the first month a retainer kicks in for that client and for however long they're with me they pay that retainer this allows me to collect cash up front which is really important for those leverage making opportunities those opportunities that require leverage and it covers my startup time for setting up each client but then I also have a retainer there for ongoing work with this method I'm no longer just doing one-off massive Giga builds I'm doing iterative development and I'm implementing an MVP now what an MVP is it stands for minimum viable product and it's actually something I learned back in University when I was studying coding if you take a project with an end goal in mind it's usually massive and if you try and create all the features at once it's going to be like this Frankenstein of a monster where you're continuously run into issues trying to test iterate test iterate on all of the features all at once and you never really accomplished the goal it's kind of like trying to put a roof on a house before putting the walls up or trying to add doors before there's a frame instead of that you find out what the client wants as their end goal and you find the absolute minimum solution of what you can do to get them there now this may not have all the bells and whistles and niceties and everything that's really funky and cool to have but it gets the job done so that's my first build now and every month that they are on retainer they get allocated anywhere from 5 to 10 hours of build time per month which they then can put that towards different features that they would like implement it into their ecosystem so at the start I charge the build which is just the MVP the absolute minimum to get them to where they want to be and then they have project hours every month that they can allocate towards new features or different resources they would like in their ecosystem doing this is a really helped me focus on the end goal of my client they get to enter and get up and running as fast as possible and I get to iterate on their solution over time taking a lot of pressure off me to try and get it all done in one go however in saying all of that here's a couple of extra learns that I think are really crucial that you should understand whilst doing this kind of process of changing your offer and pricing always have a contract in place now the reason I say this is purely because of scope in a contract you can outline what is going to be done in the MVP or what's in your retainer anything like that and it allows you something to fall back on if the scope starts to expand past what you agreed upon you can go back and say hey this isn't a part of our scope if you would like me to do this I can invoice you on a per project basis second is don't be afraid to name a high price Automation and solution building is a niche skill set and it takes a certain kind of person to be able to do it so even though it may come easy to you don't forget that you are still solving a really big problem for your clients and that is valuable so commander high price I hope you found this video insightful if you have any more questions or comments please leave them below and if you are looking to join a community of like-minded people I've created Discord server that's entirely free to join where you can jump in and learn everything about Automation and find out from people who are in the trenches doing what you potentially want to do as well the link is available through my free course below bye