What We'll Cover: Defining Terms

Transcript

In this course, I'll be talking about what to do before the sale, and what to do during and after the sale. We'll be covering topics including things like identifying problem clients before they become clients from hell, identifying red flags in the sales and discovery process, setting clear expectations from day one and establishing mutual respect, helping potentially problematic clients become good clients with a little bit of nudging, steeling yourself with confidence to know when to walk away from the wrong client and streamlining your own project management for success beyond the sales pitch.

There will also be some worksheets for you to download and print and fill out to help you build a process that is repeatable and sustainable and reliable to help you weed out people you don't want to work with and find the really good clients.

Before we move further, let's define some terms that I'll use throughout this course: this course is for creative professionals, one-man shops, small agencies, freelancers, and solopreneurs. I'll probably use the term "freelancer" the most, but it applies to everyone equally. "Freelancer" is just a good catch-all term.

One thing you'll notice is I like to use terms like "client," "potential client," "prospective customer," things like that. I don't like to use the term "lead," or "leads." It's funny: I work in lead generation for a living, but I think that's dehumanizing. It reduces people to views and clicks. We're talking about clients, prospective clients. Actual, real, live human beings. And as I said, that's part of the challenge of running a business, like a freelance operation. It's dealing with people. So keep thinking about all the people that we're talking with as actual, real human beings, just like you and me.