Making repeat sales by identifying opportunities

05. Jan, 2010 0 Comments

A large part of effective freelancing is effective selling. While we might think we are designers or writers, we are actually salespeople.

Here’s an example of a repeat sale opportunity that could easily go begging.

A year or two ago I made a simple website for a small magazine. It’s just a basic website with a little bit of information and a place where issues can be uploaded every couple of months.

Since then, the company has grown and the magazine readership has grown.

Now there is a real opportunity to grow the website as well. We can grab some of the content from the mag and put it in a blog, create a community around the blog, expand readership even further, and ultimately, sell some advertising on the website.

That’s the thing about repeat sales, sometimes they come to you, but more often, you have to identify the opportunity, and recommend it to the client. Most of the time, the client won’t be aware the opportunity even exists.

So how to approach a client with a new idea? Well I like to do it the way I do everything – ask a bunch of questions. For the client, the only thing that matters to them about anything I do is that it has to make them more money.

So some questions in this scenario would be something like “So if you had 5000 page views per month, would you be able to sell some advertising space on there, and if so, how much for? So if you had 20000 page views per month, would you be able to sell some advertising space on there, and if so, how much for?”.

That gives us an idea of the return for the client.

Then all that is left to be done is to figure out if we can achieve those objectives at a cost that will return a positive ROI for the client. If that’s the case, it’s time to suggest the solution, make up a proposal or whatever, and let the client decide if they want to make the investment.

How do you go about making repeat sales? Do you think you could be more effective in this area?

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