Einar Vollset — "How I Grew My Productized Consulting Offering To $100K YRR In 12 Months (and You Can Too)"

(This article is part of the MicroConf 2015 Recap. Want to explore more talks from the event? Go back to the Recap Hub)

Main Concept

How to grow a Productized Consulting offering

Talk Recap

Background

  • Consulting / freelancing since ’09
  • Had mouths to feed — rollercoaster of freelancing — no money coming next month

Recurring Revenue Is Key

  • AppAfterCare.com
    • High-touch concierge app maintenance for businesses with an App already in the AppStore
    • $120k YRR

Key Points for Productized Consulting

  • Sell to businesses
  • Charge more
  • Make customers more money — are you creating issues for them or solving problems for them?
  • Save them time / hassle
  • Sell to an industry that you know — If you don’t understand the market / don’t speak the lingo, don’t sell to them.
  • Don’t make it about your time — Don’t sell X units of your time (it’s a great start), but sell a ‘thing’ that solves a business problem, not something that’s tied to time
  • Pursue Partnerships & Referrals
  • Pick a service where leads have a ‘web visible service’

Major Benefits of Productized Consulting

  • Sell like a SaaS / conventional product
  • Identify prospects to contact based on things they put on the Internet
  • You can make an automated, scalable, and profitable sales process

Prospecting for AppAfterCare

  • Identify key characteristics of ‘ideal’ customers — 10 – 250 employees, tech industry, SF Bay Area, Austin
  • Crawl AppStore new submissions, find companies that match the above release
  • Find contact details (senior, not engineer) and contact with a freebie related to being new in the appstore/comment about state of app
  • Follow up until they tell you to get lost or become a customer (HT Steli @ close.io))

Tools and Tips™

  • Have a good drip marketing email provider
  • You need a CRM →  high LTV prospect is a terrible thing to lose
  • Outsource finding emails (Databases, ODesk, VA)
  • Outsource appointment scheduling (Zirtual, Fancy Hands)

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Speaker’s Slides

Links to Speaker’s Websites

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(This article is part of the MicroConf 2015 Recap. Want to explore more talks from the event? Go back to the Recap Hub)

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