Case Study : Selling a Service Online
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Case Study : Selling a Service Online
Case Study : Selling a Service Online
In the previous article, I made a case about the way we perceive the world around us. This has a direct impact on the way we perceive ourselves, our capabilities and our limits. Some will resist the notion, and that’s actually expected. Sometimes, its easier or safer to just embrace our Limiting Belief. After all, in essence, that’s how a Limiting Belief is created. Our mind is trying to keep us safe.
While belief is a powerful, powerful tool, it has to be tempered with rationality. Just because you believe the rent has been paid will not make it so. No amount of belief, alone, will. However, if you put that belief behind education and strategy, something happens. Magic? Miracle? Manifestation? Results.
How I got started coaching.
It wasn’t really my intent. The first client was even a paying client. I was focused on my business and trying to figure out other ways to make money on line. I already had two failures under my belt, and was studying a new business model which while it resulted in limited success, it was technically a failure as well.
A friend of mine had somehow developed a lifestyle where her well-paying job was not covering her living expenses. She hadn’t really called me to ask for help. She just needed a friendly ear to vent into.
She didn’t directly ask me for money. But the underlying tone in her voice was clear. She was desperate to get the money, but she didn’t know how. She was probably afraid to ask for it as well, fearing rejection. Her focus was the fact that she didn’t have enough money and not enough time to get some before it became a legal issue. She was focused on scarcity. Which led to a worse situation.
She simply had no belief that she could get the money in time, and it was breaking her spirit.
Now, I didn’t ask how much she needed and she didn’t say either, but an educated guess for “not have all the rent” would be at $500 or more, which to me, didn’t really sound like a big problem. I could have (and would have) loaned or outright given them to her. But come next month, she might be faced with the same problem.
The problem was not that THIS month, she didn’t have enough.
The core problem was her finances. She was spending more than she was making, and was allocating funds improperly. When you have financial problems there are really only two options.
Option 1: Austerity Mode. You cut your expenses down, which may mean a reduction in quality of life.
Option 2: Borrowing. You get the cash from someone else.
Option 1 is usually the sensible choice for most people. It is also a very difficult choice for many because it hits their ego, and if feels like accepting defeat.
Option 2 is usually the beginning of descent into a dark spiral that is really difficult to recover from. Option 2 usually involves one of three situations:
Deplete Existing Resources. Sell your stuff, spend your savings, max out your cards.
Borrow Money from Family / Friends. This almost never ends well. This is how bridges burn.
Borrow from Institutions or Loansharks. These are very high interest loans that usually require collateral, or will incur physical harm if they are defaulted.
The thing is … there does exist an Option 3. Most people don’t think about it, or more appropriately, don’t believe in it.
Putting Belief Into Motion
After our conversation I gave it some thought. I was in no position to tell her how to spend her money or live her life, so Option 1 was out of the question. Option 2 was open but not desirable. However, there was another option.
Option 3: Increase your Income.
This is fairly obvious. When people begin to sense that their lifestyle is catching up to their income, the first thing they do is to ask for a raise. If that fails, then they look for another job. And if that fails, they get a second job. This is all well and good if you have the time to wait for any of those outcomes.
When the rent is due in the first five days of the month, and you are on the last week of the month, there really is not time for any of those solutions.
Instead, you have to either sell your stuff, or provide a service in your spare time. So far, this is all obvious, no breakthrough right?
Here it is though: what if I could set her up with an online business? At the time this happened, my regular business was already fully online. On the other hand, I had tried my hand at two other business models that had failed (Done-For-You website, and a Blog). At the time, I was learning a third business model called affiliate marketing. I had an idea to use one of the components to build a business for her. However, I didn’t tell her anything right away. One of the most devastating things a person can experience is to have their hopes raised, only to have them crash and burn.
The two most important elements in setting up a business are: getting a product or service people want, and finding the people who want it.
My primary business is a virtual call center that specializes in over the phone interpretation (spoken, real-time translation). Within that industry exist two other disciplines: written translations, and audio transcriptions. My friend, like me, is a native Spanish speaker, but we also have native-level English speaking skills. So, I now have a product: the service of translating and transcribing from English to Spanish.
From my regular business, I also knew exactly who would need such a service: Doctors, Lawyers and Insurance Agencies. All of them either produce documents that need translation. They also have audio recordings that need to be transferred to text. Now I had a market.
Now, when you have a product you want to sell, where is the best place to sell it? Where your competitors are. That’s why malls work. Its where buyers go to buy. So if you have a freelance service you want to sell, you go to a freelance site. I proceeded to create a profile for her in Fiverr.Com and another in Upwork.Com
Now, the idea was for her not to know I was doing this, just in case it failed. Rather than use her email, I created an email for her on my own email server.
Another advantage of signing up at the freelance websites is that there is an extra level of insurance that you WILL be paid for the completion of your job (“gig”).
So, at this point I had set up a system that would receive the orders and collect payments. Now came the hard part. Making Sales.
At the time of this experiment, I was still learning the ropes. I had bought and tried various money-making programs online, and I had learned, the hard way, what none of them ever tell you. Without targeted web traffic, you will not make sales. This was the single point that wavered my belief. So I needed to bring people to her profiles.
I used a couple of online resources that allowed me to collect names and email addresses. I got 2000 attorneys, 2000 Insurance companies and 1000 doctors. I chose them Florida, Texas, California, Washington and Tennessee. These are the states with the highest concentrations of Spanish Speakers. I split each in half … one half pointed to the Upwork profile and the other half to the Fiverr profile.
I thought about New York, but most speak English there, I thought. Anyhow, this was the longest part of the process. It took nearly 5 hours to compile and format.
Next, I wrote a single email Unfortunately, at the time, I hadn’t taken my copy-writing course yet, so it wasn’t as compelling as it might have been, but still, it contained all the selling points I needed to get across. I had really high hopes and put a lot of faith into it. I sent it, and I went to bed.
When I woke up in the morning, I checked the email I had set up, and my heart sank a little. No responses. So, I set about to do my day, and resolved to look at the problem from a different angle later.
A Taste of Success Strengthened my Belief
Later on I went to lunch and thought I’d check it.
There were FOUR emails from Fiverr requesting RFP’s!!! It was working! My belief had been renewed!
For those who don’t know, an RFP is a request for proposal. A client tells you what they need and you propose a price and turn around time.
I was more happy about THAT than I had been about the milestones I’d had in my own business.
So, I called her right away and said I had a surprise.
I gave her instructions on how to configure the email I had made for her onto her phone. I said to her, “Take 1 hr to read the first 3 emails. Then look at the rest. Call me if you have any questions.”
The fist email was from me: filling her in on the plan. The second two emails were the account confirmation emails with training links from Fiverr and Upwork. The others were the companies that had responded.
In the end, she ended up getting 13 Fiverr and 5 Upwork. So, let’s take a look at the numbers.
13 responses out of 2500 that advertised Fiverr represents 0.0052% Optin-rate. Upwork was even worse, at 0.002% optin rate (5 responses).
Neither one even hit 1% of the intended audience.
Of the RFP’s she received, she closed 8 from Fiverr and only 1 from Upwork. The cheapest one was for $75.00, the most expensive one was $150.00 and she was able to complete them all within 4 days. In the end, she had made just under $1200 in that time. That’s just under what her job paid every 2 weeks.
What? How Did You Do That?
To be fair, I had a bit of an advantage here. I already knew this would work because I had already done this in my own business, and gotten pretty good results. The only difference is that I had done it in the B2B market, not the B2C space. This was my first attempt at B2C.
For those who don’t know, B2B is Business to Business. B2C is Business to Consumer. In my business, I render service to other businesses as a White Label Service. The advantage of that is that I do not need to advertise my service. My clients do that. I just service calls for them. B2C is quite different.
Nevertheless, my reasoning and belief had been, following the 80/20 rule, out of 5000 emails, only 20% would even open it, so that would be 1000. Out of those 1000, I figured 20% might have immediate interest in the service and ask for a proposal. Of the 200 proposals I thought I (she) would receive, I figured 20% would actually was something NOW. And of those 40, I figured she could actually close 8, and hopefully those 8 would cover what she was missing.
The other 32 would be short term closures, and well, now that I had a system in place, she could just do this again next month. The results actually worked out so much different than I had worked them out in my head.
I got nowhere NEAR the number of optins I expected, at less than 1%.
Closure rate, however, turned out to be fantastic. It was at 50% overall, and 61% from Fiverr. The Customer Acquisition Cost was 0, the Margin was 100% and the average customer transaction turned out to be $125.00.
I learned a lot of things from this exercise.
To begin, I found out that the B2C market was a market I had largely ignored in my business, but had huge potential.
I learned that even a “failure” can have a good measure of success. By marketing standards, optin rates below 1% are an abysmal result. However, each converted client was worth an average of $125.00 so even abysmal results, with a high closure rate, produced a profit.
I also learned a really powerful lesson about the -power of belief.
When she called me, she was desperate because she was focused on what she needed, on her scarcity. She had an obstacle in front of her and had zero belief that she could get past it. She didn’t know, and didn’t believe, that she had value that she could parlay into the solution for her problem.
Her limiting belief had put her in a negative state. But I had no such limiting belief. Quite the opposite, I was certain we would succeed. And above that, I had the education to know exactly what steps to take. And now that she knows its possible, the Limiting Belief is no more. She no longer works at her old job. Instead, she now owns her job working from home.
Her new job is still a trade of time for money. However, she makes more money now in less time. She has time freedom because she can usually decide what hours she performs her service in. As long as deadlines are met, she works when it suits her. Her job is location independent, so she can work while on vacation. She is stress-free because she can almost print money by just sending out an email. If she gets overloaded she outsources the work. And she gets to spend quality time with her kid.
To succeed, all you really need is to strengthen you belief in yourself, and develop a strategy. But that is material for another article. For now, the takeaway I offer is this. Do not listen to your Limiting Belief. Limits are all in the head, and with the proper education, any limit can be extended or broken.
Better Health. More Money. Quality Time. That’s what I’m all about.
