How to Sell Internet Marketing Services – Process & Strategy

The process of selling internet marketing services is quite similar to any other service you could offer to local businesses.

You may be looking for your first client ever or are a traditional print business looking to expand into the digital space. Either way, this article will cover the process and strategy involved in internet sales to get you and your team up to speed and ready to go.

The topic of online sales is huge so we’ll limit this article to the most important factors. Also, we won’t go into promotional strategies to generate leads as that’s something we already fully discussed in the article linked.

Defining a Service Offering

As with all effective marketing strategies, the beginning of your sales starts with your audience.

You’ll significantly improve your sales process simply by focusing on one niche industry to target at a time.

Secondly, the more you know about the desired and needs of that audience the better you’ll be able to shape an offer that sells itself.

Begin first with deep market research to better understand what services to offer businesses and at what price.

 

Internet Marketing Services

There are a wide variety of services you can offer but 3 in particular stick out the most in terms of effectiveness and popularity.

1) Search Engine Optimization

2) Google Ads

3) Facebook Ads

The benefit of offering these services as opposed to web design/development is that they usually require recurring payments from clients. The recurring nature makes these marketing services amazing for building up passive recurring cash-flows.

For example, you can easily find seo clients that pay $1000 per month for your services on on-going basis. This number adds up over time!

I recommend focusing your attention on offering a single service in order to effectively systemize and scale your operations.

Pricing Models

The next factor you’ll want to consider before any sales call is your pricing models.

As mentioned before, your pricing is heavily controlled by the market you’re in and it’s also going to be controlled by the service you offer.

You’ll want to determine what your competition is charging customers for their services (through market research).

With this knowledge in hand, you can craft your own pricing packages based around the value you add at different stages of a marketing campaign.

 

Preparing For Discovery Calls

Preparation is king. Go into ever call assuming you’re going to close the sale. This is common sense to most people but it seems common sense is rare in practice.

Here’s a list of things you’ll want prepared before going into a sales call.

1) Notes on the company and person you are selling

2) Sales script, questions, and common objections

3) Templated proposal

4) Pre-Filled Invoice

We talk about how to pitch clients as well as the digital marketing sales process, in its entirety, in more detail within the guides previously links so check these out as well.

 

Know Your Pitch

Don’t be one of the sales people who gloat about improvising conversations. Regardless of whether you’re a natural extrovert or not, a script will always enhance your ability to close.

Beyond this, creating and following a script standardizes your sales process so that it can be delegated to reps; allowing your sales operations to scale. You can’t scale improvisation…

 

Hook the Conversion

Hooking the conversation involves quickly building rapport. The mistake most agencies sales reps make is they think rapport is built once and forgotten… it isn’t.

From the moment you open your mouth to the moment you end a relationship with a client is the moment when you’re building or maintaining rapport; it never ends.

 

Qualify the Prospect

It’s detrimental to your business to work with clients that are unqualified. Further, it’s detrimental to your business to spend copious amounts of time with prospects that will never buy from you.

Your goal in a sales conversation is to quickly determine with the prospect is a company you can/should work with.

Dig deep (with questions) into the inner workings of the prospect’s business. Find out where they are right now in terms of new customers. Determine what their logical and emotional goals are for the future. Inquire about where the owner is struggling in reaching their goals.

This information is vital to scanning out low quality leads and even better, gives you the upper-hand later in the sales call when you can frame your pitch around their desires.

Lastly, and perhaps most powerful, qualifying the prospect frames you as the buyer in the relationship rather than the sales person.

 

Perfecting the Pitch

Rule of Thumb: pitch early to surface true buying objections

Generally, I’ll pitch a prospect immediately after confirming they are a good fit for our company and services.

The pitch looks like a 2 minute outline of you, your company, and services, followed by some quick selling points then ask for the sale.

As the saying goes, keep your powder dry. Keep most of your strongest selling points for later on in the conversation since we are assuming the client will raise an objection.

 

Yes, you heard that correct, we are expecting the prospect to give us a ‘no’ on the first close. This is because we’ll plan on looping their objection and reselling our services with stronger selling points to amp slowly amp their buying temperature.

 

Loop Objections

Sort of like in Tai Chi, you don’t want to counter objections directly. Instead, it’s better to see objections as yellow lights in which you have to take a step back, slow down the tempo, and redirect the individuals focus.

First, start by reiterating the prospect’s concern back to them to let them know you’re listening. Then, quickly reassure them for having the concern then redirecting their attention using a question. The question you ask gets their mind away from their objection and is used to reframe your services in a new light.

Their objection could be, “well, I barely know you, I’ll have to think about it” and your response loop could be, “you’re right, you probably have forgotten my name by now (jokingly)… I’m guessing if I’ve been producing x amount of revenue for you over the past 3 years we wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now, right!? Let me re-introduce myself…”

Then, resell your services once more but this time center your sales pitch around their objection (not buying from people they don’t know).

Most people won’t buy even on the second pitch so it’s likely you need to repeat this loop multiple times in a conversation before the prospect is ready to buy.

 

Send & Sign Proposal

Assuming the client is ready to move forward, you should have the proposal and invoice ready to send out.

I suggest sending both of these to the prospect while still on call as waiting will decrease your chances of making the sale.

 

What Most Agencies Forget

The last thing to note before closing out this guide is that most sales aren’t made on the first call.

It’s important to find the balance between pushing too hard and not pushing enough for the sale.

On one hand you don’t want to give up too early and on the other you want to make sure not to burn the sale and relationship.

Sometimes companies are just not ready to get started right away. In these cases, don’t think of yourself as a sniper but instead act as a farmer. Continue to follow up with warm leads weeks, months, and even years after your calls.

Eventually, the company will need internet marketing services and guess who will be there in the back of their mind when that time comes?