Step 1: Look at successful sales calls or happy customers. What’s working?​

By this point, you’ve gone through tons of pitching and selling and converted some strangers into happy customers. (If you haven’t yet, what are you doing here? Get back to chapter 4 and get to selling! Hit your sweet spot!)

Now, how are you going to figure out what they loved about working with you though, short of asking them?

First of all, do not be afraid to ask them outright. Don’t phrase it that way (“Heyyy, do you like me?” 🥺). But the socially acceptable version of this is to request a post-project testimonial.

You can safely collect these after the fact. Your customers should be more than happy to provide, and you can mine the response for your answers.

This can raise some issues, however, depending on your line of work.

If your service is less focused on the process, and doesn’t involve much working together directly, most of your customers may say variations of, “I love what they made! The deliverable was better than I hoped.”

And hopefully, you’re already aware that people like what you make for them.​

One way to circumvent this is to adjust your ask...