YES-terday, I won - but not alone. WE won.
A bit of context :
Yesterday, I had a meeting face to face with my first client - Or said differently, partner, because he was one of the first people that trusted me with the skill of Marketing that I didn't have.
Two years ago, he gave me a full go (2K monthly budget) at generating leads for him in the Solar niche.
I didn't know anything, started from scratch. I did have good results because of a law changing soon, so very high demand. But after the law changed, demand decreased A LOT, so I lost confidence.
Recently, this client was approached by a marketing agency, and I gladly helped him & them because I wanted the best for the client that trusted me in the past.
I had the impostor syndrom at that moment, I felt like I couldn't understand the Market anymore, ads & leads generation, and was in the middle of learning advertising from scratch from someone doing Meta Ads full time (I paid 2.8K β¬ for this, which was half of what I had left after 1.5 years).
The marketing agency didn't do well at all, and came up with tons of excuses, very low reactivity, tons of meetings and blaming me (lol) and the client about X or Y or Z. The client was unhappy and told me to come back.
And this is what I did (leverage was high) - I told them YES I'll come back, BUT under some conditions.
1) I don't want to work with a monthly retainer of 500β¬ or count the hours spent for the client, and give an hourly rate because the faster/better I get, the worst it is for me. I wanted to generate as much money as possible for the client, even if I had to work more, and more frequently.
2) I wanted to invest myself fully in this, and for 2 months (July + August) try to generate as much leads as possible for him, while being fully transparent and communicate as much as possible with the full team in charge of calling leads, sales, delivery if needed. I wanted to automate most of the communications (mail, sms).
And all of this, FOR FREE - Until I'm satisfied with the results. I wanted to negotiate at the highest point, which is when leads are transformed into MONEY for the client (It takes 30-90 days for leads to convert).
Result after almost 2 months (1 week left) :
- The client has spent 5.33K β¬ until now.
- I have generated 280 leads for him and we're not even at the end of the second month. The promise I gave was 100... for both months !!! That's almost 3X the objective.
- I have automated a lot of the flow (leads receive emails, sales guy receives an SMS with contact info for the lead, lead status updated in a shared Excel sheet for tracking, etc.)
And now, the client told me he actually needs a person half to full time on just calling the leads because that's "too much backlog".
Ok, for now it's not yet MONEY generated. But for sure that feels good to help on the biggest constraint : getting people to know about the client.
I'll update you on this client but it's only the delivery part. Today I have to find new clients in the Niche, and OVERdeliver while UNDERpromising with FAST results.