Why selling less landed me better clients

Hey - It’s Tailor
This is the very first newsletter of The Net Effect, and I’m genuinely pumped you’re here!

In Today's Newsletter

• How selling less led to winning more:

• App worth checking out:

• Question of the week:

• Side notes:

How selling less led to winning more:

Today I want to talk about “foot in the door” services.

Basically, the idea is to take on a smaller project first, in order to land the bigger gig later on with potential clients. When you go to the store, it’s much easier to spend $50 than it is to drop $1000 on something, right?

Think things like:

• Accounting cleanup gigs

• Answering a few tax questions

• A one-time consultation

• Help with QuickBooks

For me, it’s always been about one question:
How can I get someone to trust me the fastest?

Selling something smaller and easier to say yes to was the best way to win that first piece of work and prove we were worth hiring for the bigger stuff.

This de-risks you for the client. You go from that random firm, to that person they’ve worked with before and trust. They’ve seen how you operate and know what to expect.

When I started my firm about three and a half years ago, I was landing gigs on Upwork doing things like clean-ups, QBO consulting, and financial statement prep.

They weren’t huge, but they were easy to scope and quick to deliver.
I’d hop on a call, work with the clients, crush the work, and deliver quickly.

Because the experience was smooth for them and the work was good, almost all of these clients came back when they had a need.
They’d hire me again and this time for the bigger engagements like monthly accounting or fractional controller support.

That’s how I fell into building Celerity in the beginning.
Almost every early client came from one of these “foot in the door” engagements. Some even started out at a few hundred bucks and ended up as $5k a month engagements that I’m still working with to this day.

So how can you use this sales tactic today? Here's how I'm considering this at a larger scale:

Build bite-sized productized offerings. Quick, repeatable, and easy to do.

Things like…

• $250 consultations

• Flat fee clean-ups (fast)

• Financial health check-up

• Maybe even.. vibe-coding a financial scorecard?

Build out the SOP’s, market them, and dial them in so your team can run them without you. Bring in potential clients, win, repeat. The faster you can complete this offering, the better.

And lastly, this is also a filter for bad fit clients. They’re not only experiencing your services, but you are also qualifying them without being stuck in a bigger commitment. Don’t like the owner? Not a fit for your firm? No problem. Just wrap the work and move on.

Something to think about if you’ve never thought about selling this way.

I’m curious, have you tried this before?

App worth checking out:

A client showed me this app called Wispr Flow recently. Basically, you press a key (Fn on Mac, Ctrl+Win on Windows), speak while on any text field, and it instantly transcribes and punctuates your thoughts.

Try it out. It’s so useful & incredibly quick. Great for quick notes and it’s ideal because it works in any text field.

Question of the week:

What’s the smallest job you ever landed that turned into a huge client?

I’d love to know what’s worked for you & your firm and why.

Side notes:

I’ll be at Bridging the Gap next week in Denver (Monday to Thursday). If you’re going to be there, hit me up. It would be fun to connect in person!

This newsletter will go out every other Friday, so keep an eye out for issue #2 on August 1st.

Also, I’m lining up a few guest contributors for future editions. If there’s something cool you’re doing inside your firm such as tools, workflows, positioning, or whatever. Shoot me a message. I would love to feature some other voices from the community.

Thanks for reading & have a great weekend!

T