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- What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of 100 Days of SEO. My name is Brendan Hufford. I help SEO clients ranging from $90 million venture-backed startups to local window washers and real estate agents and interior designers. I'm so excited 'cause today I'm gonna share with you the proposal tactics that I used when I was getting started in SEO. It's not what we use at Clique Studios anymore 'cause we usually work a lot in tandem with web design and web development and everything, but I'm gonna show you exactly what I used from a proposal standpoint to land my first big SEO clients. We're gonna go inside right here. That's my house. We're gonna go inside the house, we're gonna hop in my laptop, I'm gonna explain all of that. Let's do it. (whistle) What's up, everybody, Brendan Hufford here. We're in my computer now. I'm gonna share with you a template that closes 60 to 90% of new SEO clients. Now, you don't even have to have any current SEO clients to use this template. It's perfect for newbies for that reason, but also, if you've been using the same old, tired templates to do pitches forever and you are ready, you know, maybe you have some clients, maybe you have a good thing going in your consultancy or agency and you got a great track record, but you're looking to close bigger enterprise, bigger SaaS clients. This is perfect for you. It's also perfect, and we'll get to this at the end, for people who are bad at math, like me. So with that said, make sure you stick around to the end. I've got something pretty awesome for you. Here's what it is. Today we're gonna talk about why a proposal like this works, why it's scary effective, what it taps into inside of humans that makes it so effective. Where I learned to create such a good proposal. How I use it to get more SEO clients. And a bonus at the end is like how to really close a lead. A proposal's wonderful, but we all get to that awkward phase where you say how much money it's gonna cost and they sit there and look at you, and you're not sure what to do. We're gonna take care of all of that today. I already know I did a brief intro, but name is Brendan Hufford. I'm the founder of SEO for the Rest of Us and 100 Days of SEO. I am the SEO Director at Clique Studios, the best design agency on the planet. I get to do all sorts of amazing SEO stuff there for our design clients, but also for strictly SEO clients, and I am a former teacher. I spent 10 years in the classroom. I was an assistant principal. I have three little boys, shout out to all the dads out there, shout out to all the teachers out there, but trust me, I am as regular as it can get. I am just like you. If I can do this, so can you. First tip, we gotta start here. Be a professional. Go on Canva, if you don't know how to design, I don't know how to design. If you think these slides look good, it's just Canva, Canva.com. Design sells your work. It sells more than anything else, more than any sort of informations or spreadsheets or salesmanship. You have to have well-designed proposal templates. It has to be solid. So let's start there and get grounded there. Now, I want to start there, but now I wanna introduce you to Andy Raskin. Andy is a messaging and positioning expert responsible for crafting some of the most successful sales, marketing, and investor pitches in Silicon Valley. Now, I didn't describe Andy that way. Somebody way smarter than me and way above my pay grade did. Here's what Andy figured out. Andy talks a lot about this thing called the hero's journey. You'll recognize the hero's journey. It's present in everything that you love. Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Matrix, Spider-Man, Lion King, Lord of the Rings, but also, Indiana Jones, Finding Nemo, Inside Out, Back to the Future. Every famous movie and most of the famous books out there, including The Hunger Games, like everything follows the same hero's journey, and when you can figure out how to leverage that in your presentations and in your proposal templates, you are going to win. Here's what I mean. A lot of people don't give credit where it's due. The hero's journey, I would credit it definitely to Joseph Campbell. He put together a couple ideas, but he wrote this book back in the '40s called The Hero With A Thousand Faces where he figured out that all the stories around the whole world follow this same template called a monomyth where you have this hero gets a call to adventure. They meet a mentor, they go from their normal world into this unknown world. They have trials and tribulations. Something happens and they're reborn as something else. They have a revelation, there's more changes, they get a gift, and they return changed to share what they know with everybody else. You'll recognize this as Neo, as Frodo, as Harry Potter, as Marty McFly in Back to the Future. It's all the same stuff. The more we can tap into this, this is something that's hard wired into us as humans. The more we can tap into this, the better. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna walk you through, this is a break down that Andy did of a sales deck. I'm gonna help you connect this, don't worry, but we have to understand the why before we get to the what. So I'm gonna walk you through this sales deck from Zuora. Zuora is a subscription payment processing company, and Andy said this was the best sales deck he had ever seen. So the first thing that they do in this sales deck, and I'm gonna make each of this so the hero, each step of this to the hero's journey here. The first thing they do is they kind of just give this big goal. The people who would work with them, their ideal client, their ideal customers, want to turn their customers into subscribers. What they're doing here is they're crossing the threshold. The normal world is the world of customers. The unknown world is the world of subscribers. Next what they do is they put on here, this is kind of like the five, what Andy talks about, the five, and I'll summarize this again, so don't worry. Make sure you take notes while you're watching this, but don't worry, I have this all on some slides at the end. Make sure you watch until the end. The first thing that Andy talks about is you have to name a big relevant change in the world. Don't kick off like every other SEO proposal deck I've ever seen where it's like, here's an executive summary and here's us and here's how great we are and blah, blah, blah. That's a huge mistake. Don't talk about where your offices are and the awards you've won. None of that. Just make sure you talk about a big, relevant change in the world that applies to your business, SEO, and your client. Will this work for everything else? Will this work for dev proposals and writing proposals and content marketers and design proposals? Of course, of course. But those will be separate videos, I guess. Like let's keep this focused on SEO, Brendan. (laughs) The next thing that they do is they chronicle an outline of the change. Now, I've put together two slides. There's two different slides they've used in the past. This is the first one where they talk about how we're living in a different era now, and it chronicles that change into a subscription economy. Here's the second version of it. If you notice the subtle important difference, what most pitch advice tells you, which is to start with the problem, but when you assert that they have a problem, you're gonna put them on the defensive, Andy says. They might be unaware of the problem or admitting that they're suffering from a problem. So let's look at the difference between these two. The first one says we are living in a different era. It puts us all together. And then, the next one says a shift from products to relationships. They're really doubling down. The second version is the one they use officially now. It's the updated version. They're really talking about this change, right? Instead of saying we're all living through this, it's like, look, this shift has happened. They talk about the way, how this change is permanent, how it's not gonna go back, this is not a fad. And what they're doing here is they're going from crossing the threshold into the trials and into the failure. They are positioning themselves as the guide for the person they're pitching, the person they're selling, we will guide you through this change. Look, we've already seen it, we've mapped it all out, we know what's going on. They talk about this global phenomenon that's happened. I love the statistics here. I love how grounded it is in just like facts and numbers and you can't disagree with it, it's right there in front of you. They talk about how everybody's doing this. In education, in cloud services, media, healthcare, communications, everybody is shifting to this new business model. What they're doing here is they're talking about the growth and the new skills you're gonna need to succeed, and I love this next part. The best companies have reinvented themselves away from products. If you're still on products, you are going to die. What they're establishing here is that in the future, this is big point number two, showed that there will be winners and losers based on this change. Look at that, 1955 average life expectancy of a company was 75 years. 2015 the average life expectancy is 15 years for a Fortune 500 company. That's incredible. All prospects suffer from what economists call loss aversion, Andy says. And like they just want to avoid a possible loss by sticking to the status quo. They don't want to risk something to gain. Change is scary, but we have to show them that this mass extinction is happening if they are not willing to change. We want to talk to them about like, it's gonna, you know, it's gonna beg the next question. Well, who's winning here? Who's losing? What's going on? They like to cite General Electric has moved from light bulbs to digital services. They talk about IBM and Watson and machine learning and AI. They talk about Unilever and buying Dollar Shave Club for a billion dollars. They also talk about Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook, like these are the relationship makers now, even Salesforce in there. Uber and Spotify, Box, Airbnb. They talk about the new disruptors are moving into this model, as well. Now, what is the common thread between all of them? What are they doing? They're bringing you into the revelation. They've gone through, they've guided you through the death and the rebirth that's happening. They want you to see the changes that you need to make. Again, I have two slides here for this. These slides do number three, which is called teasing the promised land. This is the point now where you wanna, it's so easy to just slide into. Here's how SEO solves your problems. We tease the problem, we've told you, but we're not really teasing it, we're teasing the promise land, we're teasing, if we go back one slide, we're teasing this return of change, like you come back changed from this. Things are different now. The two slides, now, again, like let's look at the difference 'cause, again, you wanna dive into your services. You've gotta resist that. If you introduce your stuff too soon, they won't have the deepest level of context. Now, these slides don't have to take 10 minutes, but look at the difference between these two slides. "Customers now expect the subscription experience" to, "They understand we want the subscription experience." Big context change. This slide is focused on customers. This slide is focused on the companies who are winning. The people we're pitching wanna ally themselves. They want to see themselves. We can talk about customers all day, but we also have to talk about them. The original slide was on customers, this slide's focuses on the companies that are winning in this new era. They also walk through like how this is a new way of thinking. The old way versus the new way. They start to move into this. This changes everything. Again, old ways to new ways. What they're doing is positioning themselves as giving the gift. We are the product. Our product is a gift to you to overcoming the obstacles for the promised land. Getting the gift could be Harry Potter getting Gryffindor's sword, Luke Skywalker getting his father's light saber. Like all of these different, like learning to use his father's light saber. Like all of these different things. If it's not clear by now, the most successful sales decks follow this same narrative structure that I've been kind of outlining, right? They're Frodo. They are the hero here. You are Gandalf, right? You are Hagrid or Dumbledore, I don't know, whoever the mentor is there. My point is like they are Cinderella. The prospect is Cinderella, you're the fairy godmother trying to cast these spells to get them to the ball. That's how we have to position ourselves here. We are not the hero, they are. Now, these gifts in the terms of the Zuora deck is they talk about it, again, what are we doing here? We're beyond a CRM. We're gonna say exactly why we built Zuora. Here's our platform, here's what we offer, et cetera. This is the part of the pitch where you get into your offer. Now, they return changed. We gotta, you know, really double down on this. How would we return changed? Well, these other people have. This is where we get into social proof. Again, I'll summarize all of this in a second. Don't worry, I'm gonna talk to you here in just a minute about how to close these clients 'cause this doesn't get you to the close, this is just sales, this is just getting them to the point of having the sales conversation. But they walk through like, here's a testimonial. Here's a testimonial, here's a testimonial. Boom, that's what we got. Now it's time for you to start to take over. It's time for you to start your hero's journey as we've walked you through all of this. Now, like I said, if you just hang on a second I'm gonna show you exactly an exact like pay or exact slide of how to close these people 'cause you're asking yourself, "Brendan, "what the F does this have to do with SEO clients?" I wanna tell you, this stuff, this way of presenting, this hero's journey and following the sales deck model, is dangerous. It is dangerous, and here's what I mean. If you use this on people that are not prepared to pay you, they will become a pain in the butt. I tell you this with all honesty. If you use this on people, they will wanna, and they don't have the money to hire you, they will ask you a million questions, they want to work with you, but if they don't, if this is not under the guise, if you're just doing this to be helpful, don't use this. Use this on people, use this with people, not on people, with people that you want to sell to. They have to know they're being sold. If you use this unwittingly on somebody just trying to be helpful they will not understand why they so deeply want to work with you, and they'll never in their head connect I should pay this person. They will just become a burden of endless questions and everything else. The thing is like this is extremely powerful. Here's what makes it even more powerful. Here's what takes it up a level. I like to combine it with Russell Brunson's perfect webinar. He does an intro, some open loops. He talks about these three secrets, and then, he talks about the offer stack. Now, let me run you through these. The three secrets we're gonna talk about here in a second. The offer stack just looks like all the things we are offering. It's not just this, it's this and that and that and that. So we wanna make sure that we stack all of our offers together. So for SEO, you're not just providing them with SEO. You're not just providing them with content, just with links. Outline every part of that. You're gonna optimize their analytics. You're gonna hook up Google tag manager to make sure everything's tracking correctly. You're gonna make sure that we're able to show an ROI directly from SEO. It's all of these things, and stack all of those things together to help the close. Now, in theory how does this look, right? We're gonna follow, and feel free to screenshot this or write these down, they're also in the description below if you wanna copy and paste them. In theory, this is following the five most important parts of a sales deck narrative, right? The big relevant change. Show there will be winners and losers. Tease the promised land. Give them the magic gifts in the form of your product. And then, present the evidence that you can make the story come true for them. Mix it with equal parts hero's journey, little blend in of the perfect webinar, and then, close with the offer stack. That's great theory, Brendan, but like there's nothing to take action on. Now, here's what it looks like. This is an intimidating slide, but let me run through it. This is exactly how I'd run through slide by slide by slide. This can be 11 slides, that's it. It doesn't have to be more than that. Just 'cause I have like 50 something slides to explain it doesn't mean that, this can be 10 slides, right? And they can be 10 slides that you reuse over and over again. We wanna name the big end goal for the client. Now, this should come from a paid audit you've already done. Nobody should be getting sold to without doing a paid audit first. If you're just getting started, by all means, I've got a video on how to get your first 10 clients, do audits for free to get people to be your clients for free, to do testimonials and put together case studies, but eventually, you should not be doing any audits, first of all, you shouldn't be giving anybody a price before you've done an audit, and you have to do the audit in order to know what their goal is with those things. Number two, position yourself as the expert guide to take them through this journey. Share a little bit, just briefly, of how you are the guide. How you're Obi Wan Kenobi. Qualifications or awards. Remember, they're the hero in this story, not you. You have to focus on your qualifications and awards only in how it helps guide them. Then name the big, relevant change in the world. Track that change over time. I love keeping the relevant change to something in their industry and how things are changing, whether it's how they get leads or how they close sales or how people decide who to work with, things like that. Track that change over time. Explain why the change is permanent. I love statistics here, you can find tons of public statistics. Number six, like give 'em the feeling that like everybody's doing this. Show the people who are winning. Show who the winners are, show who the losers are. Tease that promised land. Number eight, summarize what those businesses are doing right. I love doing a little bit of competitive analysis here. Number nine, start tossin' out those magic gifts. What SEO services are you gonna offer and recommend to them? I love a six-month strategy here. Just say, it can be boiler plate, but just something to show like I've thought this through and here's what I think we could do if we work together. Number 10, present evidence you can make it come true. Again, a testimonial, a case study. We increased leads by this percentage, we increased sales by this percentage, get to the bottom line, and then, hit the close. When you get to the close, here's what happens. You say all right, here's my price, and it's hello darkness, my old friend. It's just silence. You say the price, the client wants to just do this. They're like, see ya. You're just praying that like they say yes and you can make it rain. It really doesn't have to be that way. Here's what we're gonna address. In one slide, one easy Google sheet, we're going to address, and this, again, comes from Russell Brunson. If you've not bought his book Expert Secrets you definitely should. He does a lot of like, he's very over the top with his sales, but it's one of the best books ever in business. He walks through, there's three real objections, three false beliefs. Number one is the vehicle. In our case, this would be SEO is the vehicle, and they would be saying, "I don't know how SEO will work for me," and we have to address that. Number two, their internal beliefs. I'm sold on SEO at this point, they're sold on number one, we have to do 'em in this order too, but there's something about me that makes me think this wouldn't work. I'm not technical, I'm not creative. We have to address that too. I'm gonna show you how here in just a second. And then, number three, I'm not sure this will work for my business, right? I'm not, they, ah, people love to say that. They love to like pursue SEO and then be like, well, I'm not really sure people are Googling this. Well, maybe not, and that might be true, and I'm gonna give you an example of that in a second. Let's take a look at this. So this is a simple Google sheet. What I've put together here is on the left is some keywords, the monthly average searches, the click percentage, this is where you know you're dealing with a real SEO if they put the click percentage in there. These are just pulled from ahrefs, they're pretty simple. But the idea that 100% of the traffic is going to organic clicks and you can use the same like 35, 25, whatever, it's not gonna work. Sometimes less than 30% of the clicks are going to organic, right? So we wanna make sure we put the click percentage in there. Tell them that, this is you positioning yourself as the expert guide. Show the cost per click, show what the monthly value is, put together this total addressable market. There's a great article by Nick Eubanks From the Future. It's FTF.agency is their website. Go check it out, total addressable market From the Future. Google it. I'll also try to put a link in the description below to that article. Put together the total addressable market. This could be thousands of keywords, right? Average your traffic capture percentage. Estimate the traffic per month. Here, bring my mouse over here, the cursor. Traffic per month is simply, you know, estimated ranking two to three, let's just be so conservative with this. Let's say they have a 5% lead conversion on their website. Super conservative. They'll end up, based on this, these kinda rough numbers, these are just for like local shredding, I didn't even check a lot of these keywords on the left, free shredding probably shouldn't be something we rank for, but it is an opportunity. Good result in around a hundred, that's why we're conservative with this, right? That's why we're conservative with the 17%, conservative with 5%. 196 leads per month. The client said they could, you know, convert 40% of those. Cool, that's 78 new sales per month. I know that the average revenue provided by the client per close for a shredding client is $500. Great, so that means a lead is worth $200. Again, that's based on average revenue divided by the client conversion rate. A lead is worth 200 bucks. If I do my job, what does that mean in terms of revenue for them? That means $39,143 per month. Now I'm gonna jack this up to a year because I want them to see the big picture of us working together for more than just the initial six month engagement or more than just month to month. In a year this could mean a half million dollars in revenue. That could be very significant for them. Now, what's the ROI for them? Now, investment, I love to take a number of, anywhere from 5 to 10% of revenue, again, that's very, it makes it just kind of a no-lose deal. This is, I'm trying to remember who I learned this from. I'll figure it out, I'll link it in the description below. But this is, it just, I love the idea of like look, we're just gonna work on a percentage and we think this is enough money to actually do the work, but we wanna give you a 2000% ROI, right? And the break even here, you don't have to put this quote in here, this is a reminder for me to tell you something, but the break even point is four. If I can get them four new sales per month of the 78, they break even on me. My services are free after that, right? Now, can we get four of 78? This gives me a good benchmark. Hey Brendan, we only closed five this month. Cool, you're in the positive. You're in, you know, we're in the green. Month two, well, we closed, we only closed, we closed two in month one and four in month two, great, we've broke even by month two, awesome. Now, let's see where we go. This is the question of, I love asking clients this. If all this did was get you four new clients, if all this did was get you four new sales per month, would this be worth it? And the answer for them should be absolutely 'cause once they hire us once, they're gonna hire us again the next time they need us. They know that the, you know, the average revenue from an initial like they may not be lifetime value. A lot of people don't have lifetime value numbers, and maybe some SaaS companies do. Enterprise companies do. But then, you can talk to them about that. But even just average revenue we know this is an easy win for them. Now, this doesn't always work, right? Here's another client. I kind of took out the keywords so you wouldn't know exatly what they did, but if you look at this, the numbers don't make sense. They're kind of a local client. Here's the best we can do. Our minimum engagement is $2,000. We're not even gonna consider working with somebody under that. I think that's still really low, but like here's what, you know, we're only conservative again, right? But like they sell tickets to their events, and we could only probably bring them 18 new sales per month. At $90 apiece, that meant monthly revenue's gonna be about 1,600 bucks, yearly revenue 20K, but at 2,000, we're less than 100% ROI. That doesn't make sense. We told them, this is not the best use of your money right now. Here are some other options. We should not take their money knowing that we cannot get them a good ROI. We should not lower our budget. Now, if you're just starting out you desperately need clients, do it for 500 bucks. Do it for a grand. My first like 10 clients were all $500 a month. Where I think I, I mean, I was ready to take clients for $200 a month and be grateful for it 'cause I was just getting started. I had no business trying to close a $10,000 a month client. So my point is, we're addressing these three core beliefs here. If we jump back really quickly, the vehicle, the internal, and the external. The vehicle. Are people Googling this? Will SEO work? Yes. Sometimes I even like to take their competitor's keywords and show here's what they're winning with. Well, it definitely is working for them, right? Then we have the internal in the bottom right, the number two. Will this work for me? Now, I'm coming in as a partner here. I'm your trusted partner. I'm your guide to walk you through all of this. They trust you by this point. We've gone through the hero's journey. We've gone through the five steps of the sales process. We understand all of these things and they trust you and now, when we show 'em the ROI, they know this will work for their business and, you know, the external belief here, I'm not, or sorry, the internal belief was I'm not sold on SEO for whatever reason, we know we're a good partner. The external belief will this actually work for my business? Sure, here's some real, actual revenue numbers. Now, I only have two slides left and I wanna share with you something. What do you say, if I client says no, you've done everything right, and they say no, what do you say? I love this line. I learned it from Joel Klettke. I'm gonna link up his website and his sales training below. He's an amazing copywriter. He says to them, maybe somebody more junior would be a better fit. Maybe I'm a little bit, I love this, he says this too, I didn't put it on the slide, maybe I'm a little bit overkill for you. Maybe you want somebody more junior. Well, nobody wants anybody junior. I don't want a junior SEO. So maybe all of the sudden I'll find some budget for this person. Here's what I want you to do. If this video is helpful, hopefully you've taken a ton of notes, we got a bunch of stuff in the description below, but I want you to comment. Comment below what is your biggest personal struggle with finding, pitching, or closing SEO clients? If you comment below, I swear to God, I will answer every single comment. Some of my videos I only answer the first 10 'cause it's so much work to like dive into somebody's website or help them with keyword research or search intent. I'm gonna answer every single comment that this video gets 'cause I want this to absolutely blow up. I think this video is easily worth, you know, $500. It's a $500 training put into a video. I know it's going to help you, so I want you to do two things. If you're struggling, by all means, but here's what I would love. If this helps you actually close a client and you figure out like you use this and implement it, come back, comment below, just say like I just closed a client with this, wow, love it, et cetera, let me know, give me some feedback. Gimme a little bit of love on this video and let me know it was helpful for you. Looking forward to talking to you in the comments. I've been Brendan Hufford. Don't forget to work hard, be nice to people, and don't get too lost trying to create something that matters, and of course, always be closing.