A lot of the freelancers I’ve spoken to think that sales processes or “funnels” are for marketing guys or large companies with sales departments. Wrong! I’ll get straight into why, with a personal example.

About 5 or 6 years ago, one of my existing clients recommended me to one of his business associates. The company was a reasonably sized e-commerce platform, and I was looking forward to speaking with them. We set up an initial call, which spanned 2 hours! The guy wanted to see multiple examples of e-commerce admin panels I’d built for previous clients, go into detail on his existing system and strategies to migrate it over, and share stories of past development problems.

No problem I thought, this is going to be a long term job.

We scheduled a second call for a couple of days later, and pretty much the same thing happened again – 2 hours of free consultancy on technical strategy, followed by emails back and forth, research and more free consultancy.

After that call, things went quiet. I followed up a couple of times and got no response. Eventually he got back to me, said that other things had come up, and assured me that he’d be back in touch very soon. I followed up a few more times in the month after – no response.
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