Proactivity as a sales engine

People who have worked with me in the past know that I’m the kind of person that is always available to give a hand, no matter what’s needed. I don’t wait for others to solve things. I actively propose and implement solutions.

Why do I do this? Because I feel that to make an impact in the world, you need to drive the change you want to see. This worked beautifully in my previous jobs, for example, at Internxt I proposed migrating the MacOS desktop app from Electron to native, which reduced refunds related to stability and performance. Today, as a freelancer, I use the same approach as my sales engine.

Selling services through proactivity

Most freelance developers wait to receive requirements from clients. I used to work this way too, but I realized it left me simply waiting for something to happen. It made me feel:

• Uncertain. What if a client stops giving me work?
• Not unique. If I only wait for requirements, how am I better than the competition?
• Not in control. If I just wait for work, how will I grow my business?
• Replaceable. If I only build what I’m told, others can do that too.

The cycle looked like this:

Client requires a feature > you provide a price > client agrees > build > wait again

Another problem was being out of touch with the real problem, assuming clients already knew what needed to be built.

So I decided to switch to being proactive first, meaning that instead of waiting for client input, I would propose clients with possible features to build based on product metrics and aligned with our quarterly goals.

For this I needed two things: to be more communicative and measurable results.

To be more communicative, because I needed to build this sales engine around sharing discoveries with clients (based on data and research) and how we could improve them.

Measurable results because they build trust in me and my decisions. After all, if I can improve feature usage by discovering issues, building solutions, delivering them, and showcasing the results, why couldn’t I repeat that?

Not all results lead to improvements, but they do lead to learning something, and that ultimately leads to improve your product.

So my new sales cycle is like this:

1. Being proactive on discovering bottlenecks by looking at data and talking to users.
2. Being open to talk with clients about what I discovered and how can I improve it by proposing new features.
3. Sharing the cost of each feature implementation. No matter if they are cheap, they need to be impactful. If it works, the client will come for more implementations.
4. Measuring results and sharing them with the client to build trust in the process and showcasing what did we learn, what did we improve and next steps.
5. Repeat.