Do you know what Sales and Marketing are? How to tackle the issues of bringing in the leads?
Which portal to work on?
Which technology to work on?
What are genuine leads?
How to understand what the client wants? Is he/she trying to know the budget or gathering information about the services?
Well, then you are at the right place because here you will get answers to all the questions mentioned above. Take a sneak peek to understand more about sales, marketing, and lead generation;
Let us start with the tips that will help you recognize whether the leads received from prospects are genuine or not-
- You can ask for the technology and details of their project
- If the prospect is non-technical you can schedule a call and explain in detail
- Ask them to specify the range of their budget, ie: from USD 5 per hour to a max of USD 15 per hour, he/she will definitely scale the budget in the range (Here I’ve given examples of hourly rates you can ask your prospect accordingly i.e dedicated rates or fix cost price).
- Explain your work to prospects, your charges for their work, why you’re charging it (for example if the client thinks that it is a high rate you can explain the quality of your work or it can also be maintenance work too)
- If there is any new work that you’ve not done before, ask your prospect to provide sample work to you as it won’t be a waste of time and resources from your side
- Once prospects share documentation of the project, instead of RFP (Request for proposal), I’d prefer to create a small presentation on how you can help prospects with existing bugs and solutions for the same, so after reviewing it prospects can reach you back with their questionnaires.
Portals on which you can on and find the prospects-
According to my experience I’ve personally worked on Upwork, Guru, PPH, Freelancer, Linkedin, Clutch, Good firms, Angellist, Twago, Xing, My Opportunity, Dribble, Behance, etc. There are many other portals but I haven’t personally used them. However, I can suggest the above-mentioned ones since all of these are easy and you can get what you are looking for on these portals.
In order to work on these portals, you need to do some homework, such as
1. How can you reach a person of a particular region?
2. Which technology is more used in a specific country?
For eg: I am looking for an agency having ROR (Ruby on Rails) as the main technology, so according to my search Japan is the country where ROR is max used, normal ranges are USD 45 per hour (min) and it is USD 100 per hour (max), but if you’re Indian it’s of no use to reach firms from Japan as the currency of Japan is Yen which is 0.66 INR and that’s too low, don’t you think so?
Instead of Japan, we can target the United Kingdom, as currency there is pound i.e 102.02 INR (varies day to day).
Coming back to the portals of Upwork, PPH, Freelancer, and Guru, you can use normal keywords such as if you’re looking for wordpress development company UK, you’ve to search for WordPress keywords and it will showcase a similar result.
Clutch and Good firms: In these portals, you can use various filters such as location, company, the strength of people in the company, technology, design/development firm.
After applying such filters you’ll be having a list of companies according to your filter, you can visit the website of said companies as well as you can reach them through Skype or Email being mentioned, you can also fill the contact us forms of a particular website.
Another way to reach any C-LEVEL EXECUTIVE is you can open the Linkedin page of that website, can find the CEO or Director of the company, open the particular profile of him/her, try to find their Gmail id as you can explain your work to them.
Now to search for the Email id of prospects you can use email finder extensions to Google such as snov.io, hunter, find that mail, Norbert, and many more some of them provide free search without any subscription, After finding Gmail you can reach them out with detailed proposals.
Xing: It is mainly used in Germany and the language is mainly used in Python for data scientists and data engineers, so if you’re searching for a lead for Python, reach out to prospects on Xing.
Dribble/Behance: It is mainly used for designing, you can showcase your work over there and prospects can visit and can hire you for design work, another thing which rarely any of us use is Quora, yes, you heard it right there are certain users facing bugs in their project and any of those experts who comes to help in order to sort out that bug, that are high chances of you being selected as prospects also uses this way to select their perfect developer.
Email marketing: Speaking of mail marketing, one should always be aware of the time difference the target country possesses.
For a start, you can schedule the mail and shoot them at a time which will be early morning or night from their end, as those people normally check the mail in the morning as well as at night regularly.
If you don’t have any business account, instead you have a new Gmail account, then in such a case, the maximum number of limits for sharing the mail is 500 per day. Thus, if you’re supposed to reach many prospects in a day, you can add Gmail add ons to your id, as one add-on can shoot 50 mails at a time (P.S. these add ons are safe and free to use).
While reaching to the prospect, you can use a brochure, template, and presentation, and yes if you find something fishy on the prospect’s website such as there is overlapping of content, contact us forms are not working, social media icons are not getting directed, and many more things you can reach them out sharing the details and how you can help them out.
Linkedin: It is one of my favorite portals which I can work on 24*7. As many of us(almost) are addicted to social media nowadays and how important the role the hashtags play we all know that very well, same as the game for Linkedin.
Suppose if you’re finding the job you can use the hashtag #findajob or #lookingforjob similarly if you’re looking to hire someone use #hiring #findapro #findamobileappdeveloper and many more hashtags you can use similarly.
As everyone knows there are various filters on Linkedin such as Post/Companies/People/Groups/Jobs/Schools/Events/Courses/Services you can search them according to your req and can get the result accordingly.
There are innumerous job posts on Linkedin and you don’t need to work on all those technologies prospects are looking for, so you can reach out to those technologies you work on and tag someone else (if you know someone who can work on that technology).
Certain rules of Linkedin are: If you’re having 3k to 4k requests pending in sent requests you will not be allowed to send the connection request to prospects and the max amount of connection you can possess is 30k. (If you’re violating some rules for it your account might get blocked).
If you’re Linkedin the account is a newbie, the number of prospects you can reach is 20. It allows you to cross this limit but there are chances of getting your profile blocked.
You can join various groups on Linkedin, be in touch with connections in groups and can share your requirements or also showcase your skills and work.
One of the effective ways according to me to be get highlighted on Linkedin is to stay super active on it, you can react to the posts of everyone, reach them out, and share them too.
Pro tip: you can put a certain amount of discount rates on projects when it is Christmas/new year/Black Friday and make sure you give them the offer that includes free changes for a time being for web design or web application development and maintenance of 1 month free since such things can make your offer way more attractive.
So, this is how I’ve been working on all such portals, I’ll be glad if you can put on your knowledge in addition to this as it can be helpful to one and the other over here.
P.S: Stay tuned for the second Marketing Blog :).
