Selling is just research you're scared of
Spend a month learning about the people you want as clients, and watch the selling take care of itself
You need clients, so you sit down to sell. You draft the message, you psych yourself up, and it feels awful, because selling to people who don't know you yet is awful, and underneath it, you're not even sure you're offering the thing they actually want.
The classic guru advice is to get better at that and work harder! A sharper pitch, more confidence on the call, make it urgent and scarce.
At first you try. Then the messages go unanswered, and the calls feel like pulling teeth, and every "no" makes the next try heavier. Eventually you avoid it altogether, and the pipeline goes cold, because selling into the dark, to strangers, about a thing you're only guessing they need, is close to the hardest thing in business.
So invert the whole thing, don't sell at all. Run a research sprint instead.
For the next month, reach out to five to eight people who you think have the problem you solve, with one goal: trying to understand their problem properly, and you'd love twenty minutes of how they actually experience it, in their words, if they do at all. Just that.
This approach gives you a couple of things at once:
First, it hands you the easiest reason in the world to reach out to people. "Can I sell you something?" makes people flinch. "Can I learn from you about the thing you struggle with?" makes them say yes, because people like being asked about their world, and they love to talk about their problems.
It tells you exactly what they need, in their words, so what you eventually build is the thing they've already told you they'd pay for, instead of the thing you hoped they wanted.
Second, it builds you a warm network of the people you want as clients, one real relationship at a time. And relationships are the best sales channel in solopreneurship.
And the cherry on top of the cake is that those conversations are the selling! I say this to clients until they believe me: in that room, you are not selling anything; you are doing research. And at the same time, you think you're doing research, but you're actually doing sales.
Because trust and pipeline are not built in a cold pitch. They're built in the conversations that build relationships. One client of mine ran exactly this: she interviewed twenty people about a problem she solves, turned it into a short report, and out of those conversations came a warm network and her first paying client. She never sold to a single one; she got curious first, had a chat, created a relationship, and the selling took care of itself.
The first issue this month landed on one hard fact: your craft is not your pitch; your judgement is. This is the other half: your best sales strategy is to stop selling and start asking.
So start the sprint this week, with one person. Pick someone who has the problem you solve, reach out and get a conversation booked, and drop any goal of winning the work; just go and learn and be curious.
If you want help shaping the sprint, who to talk to, and digesting the insights, that's what the free 45-minute call is for. go.ricardobrito.me
Who are the first five people you will reach out to?
