If you own a business and you come to Reddit to lure your clients in your sales funnel, but you can't convert any leads, here is why you should stop doing what you do and why you should start doing what is important.

Selling a service to anyone is easy if you are skilled, but it's very hard and tricky if you are a new starter into this sales network. We, sales people, recognize each others very well and we always appreciate when a good sales man sits at the same table as us, trying to sign the very same client we try to sign. Sales it's about knowing your product, but before selling any product, sales is about mind games.

Back when I started advertising my services in the organic market, I had to be creative about the information I would put in Facebook Groups, because I only had a couple of chances before someone would notice me as a good freelancer or as a bad one.

1. You do not have patience – Yet

I get it. You are hungry. You need leads to sign contracts to get money or comissions to have a better life. But rushing things will not get you anywhere.

The consumer behavior changed a lot in the recent years due to automatizations, AI and fast paced internet, but all of these lead and are leading to more and more touch points needed in the customer journey, be it an ecommerce product, a football game or a service you are selling.

If you just dump content just because you can tweak it around using AI, doesn't mean it's valuable info you post on your socials. Customers care about benefits of choosing your product, they want to see if your product is of good quality and if you are selling services, they want to know you and trust you before choosing to work with you.

2. You are advertising yourself to the wrong audience. – Or in the wrong way

Supposedly you are selling your agency services. Be it Meta Ads, SEO or Web Development, you need digital marketing clients and most of the times they can only be found online. Since you are at the very beginning of your journey you might not afford tickets to offline events yet. Or you just don't have the right networking to be invited as a guest or speaker.

If you are a freelancer and you just started, your first instinct would be to start posting about wanting to get a job inside Facebook groups or Reddit threads. Or you might add people as friends and then you would post on your timeline so they can see it. However, you might want to change this approach as soon as possible.

What can you do instead?

Because the customer journey is longer now and it needs more touch points, you want to start in the comments sections of your socials and you also don't want to be pushy with your approach.

If a person asks a question and you come with an answer that doesn't have a CTA at the end (unless it's a -I Need an agency. Drop your links- type of post), chances are you will not get a calendly call from that lead.

But chances are also, you will get followed by that person after you provide it with feedback or next time another person has a question and you answer it as good as the first time, your first lead will read that even if it won't interact with your 2nd comment on the other post.

The more resilient you are when doing this, the closer you are to check, mate. (ba_dum_tsss.gif)

3. You are too pushy

We really don't care about what you sell. I don't even care what we sell. What we want to see when we jump here is answers. To our problems. Be it a life advice or a revenue drop issue on our store, we come here to ask questions and read answers.

If you answer my question with a short point blank useless answer after which you say "book a call with me here", I will really not care about your call at all. You want to sell me something and I don't want to buy something from you. Yet.

If you are new to communication and sales, guess what, we are all snakes here. Even your customers. But we are also attention seekers. All of us. We seek attention from people who want to validate our ideas. Or our questions. Otherwise, none of us would come here to ask any damn question. We would try to figure it out ourselves.

Be nice to me, answer to me, start helping me for a long time, don't try to sell me your services. Sell me your knowledge. Show me you know and understand what you answer to me. Show me you are not interested in getting my money. Not unless I want to give it to you.

Remember, it's mind games.

4. You expect others to already know the answers – They don't. I don't. You don't.

When answering questions, try to be as explicit as possible. Nobody will steal your work from just an answer. And nobody will steal your clients if you give a helpful answer to a dumb question.

I've been advertising our services for 5 years now and let me tell you something. People absolutely HATE a plain answer without depth or quality info.
However, on the other hand, the same people LOVE comprehensive answers. Even if they sound too complicated to them. They love them. And that is happening because they came for answers to a place where they know experts or skilled people are lurking around. So they ask questions and expect great answers.

Time is money for everyone and if you waste my time reading your stupid comment, you will definitely lose my attention rather sooner than later. On top of that, I might probably just stop reading anything from you knowing you are there just to get our money.

5. You rely too much on AI and you don't understand human emotions

People are like water. They can bend at your will if you know how to guide them in a flow.

With the start of AI, a lot of freelancers and nobodies want to get our attention with "improved" and "enhanced" copywriting that we can all smell from a mile it's AI.

It's bad, man. Very bad.

Sales and selling products or services is about the emotion. You can be very not skilled in doing something, but if people notice you are trying, people also think "oh, this guy has potential to become better. I should start working with him now before he gets good and raises prices". The client also sells himself to you according to that. Promise! Pinky promise!

Back in the day I wanted to sell my meta ads services to people and I really wasn't good in the first year. Heck, I might not be as good as I could be even today. But my audience was built around honesty, patience and originality.

Whenever someone would ask a question that I knew for a fact if I answer, the lead would fix the problem and won't call me, I would give that answer in as much detail as possible.

Why is that?

Your potential lead you are answering to might have the knowledge to implement your recommendation, but other people that will read your answer, might not have the very same knowledge. But they will notice and understand that you know your game. And the emotion kicks in. They trust you and they see you as a skilled professional. And that is when you have an upper hand.

Take all of these with a salt of grain. There are a lot of better people here that you can learn from. I might be one of the lesser educated sales person around here. I was too lazy to read books and I really don't care about my direct competitors, but what I really care about is emotions and understanding what the lead needs most.

And before my services, the leads needs my expertise and my patience. And if you manage to combine those 2 and excel at it, you will 100% win the long term game.

Signed,
A marketing enthusiast.