August 7, 2019
“What if I drastically underestimate the scope of a fixed price project?” and more...
Sent by Jonathan Stark on August 8th, 2019
In today’s group coaching session, we had a bunch of good questions that touched on topics like:
- How to grow your mailing list from scratch
- How to use podcasting to grow your business
- How to get booked as a guest on podcasts in your niche
- How to get connected with ideal buyers that are hard to reach
- How to avoid headaches related to missed deadlines
- What to do if you drastically underestimate the scope of a fixed price project
- What to say if a client asks why your quote is twice as much the next closest one
Good stuff!
Here are some of the questions I answered today:
Hey Jonathan, I’m having trouble doing outreach to specific companies that I’ve identified as leads but that I don’t have any relationship with. It’s hard to find emails for these companies - sometimes their contact form or info@whatever.com email gets a response, but it feels like shouting into the void. How would you reach out to a specific company you’d like to work with? (timestamp: 1m 5s)
What advice do you have for me in getting onto popular podcasts in my target niche as a guest? I have seen some horribly written form emails sent by some “podcast guest placement services”, and I want to make sure that I distinguish myself from these. (timestamp: 14m 38s)
I’m looking for your advice on growing my email list from scratch. Some channels or strategies I’m looking at : - Hosting my own podcast - Guesting on other podcasts - Free 7 day email course - Having an automated webinar (possibly driving traffic from by Facebook ads) Do you have any suggestions on growing my email list using these or other methods? (timestamp: 21m 50s)
“We need you guarantee a date on which you and your team will deliver a perfect bug-free issue-free product.” How do you manage the delicate balance between agile development and the reality that accounts need to know an exact date when you will deliver because they are planning PR, building a marketing launch around Product Hunt, trade shows, internal timelines, fund raising, investor commitments, etc. around your delivery date? I’m dealing with an account that has a whole product launch machine behind the product we are building, we’ve slipped delivery date by 3 weeks for a number of reasons, including scope creep. How do I deal with setting delivery date expectations up front? (timestamp: 33m 54s)
One big question that’s been nagging recently is how do you know how much cushion is enough without specking out deliverables? Have you ever had a scenario where you gave a value based price and then got into the project and realized you far underestimated the effort it would take to get them the desired results? (timestamp: 48m 18s)
Another question if we have time... In the scenario where multiple people are bidding on something. Do hourly billed agencies typically have lower “quotes” than yours? Does your positioning as delivering value typically win over the client from the hourly billing agency? (timestamp: 57m 43s)
(If you’re curious, you can review the entire list of past questions here)
Do you have questions like these that you’d like to get answered?
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Yours,
—J