TCC Podcast #295: How to Lead a Discovery Call, Improve Your Sales Skills, and Build Better Habits with Ed Gandia

Ed Gandia joins The Copywriter Club Podcast for its 295th episode. Ed is a business building coach and strategist for business writers and copywriters. He helps his client by teaching them to build habits, strategies, and techniques that help them earn more in less time. In this episode, he debunks the “sales” status quo and gives valuable insight on how copywriters can become better salespeople. Here’s how the conversation went down: Ed’s background in software sales and how it was the catalyst for his copywriting career. How Ed went from 6-figures in software sales to a 6-figure copywriting business in 27 months. The play-by-play on how Ed acquired clients with no formal copywriting training. Why he niched down and how that helped him nail his messaging. The 4 questions to decide which niche is right for you. How to tap into your current network when it feels “awkward.” What if you’re a copywriter with no sales experience… How do you close leads? The reality of sales that will change your selling game. How to lead a discovery call from start to finish with the 30/70 rule. The 5 phases you need to start implementing in your discovery calls. Should you have an expiration date on a proposal? The biggest mistakes copywriters are making when approaching potential clients. Intentions vs habits – What’s the real difference? Using the James Clear approach to habit building, so you can optimize your time. How to add CEO time into your business and how Ed puts it into action in his business. The Freedom Triad – How it will help you make more in less time. Why Ed became a coach and his most common struggles running a high level business. If you want to improve your sales skills, this is the episode you want to listen to. Hit play or check out the transcript below. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: The Accelerator Waitlist The Copywriter Think Tank Copywriting Income Survey Kira’s website Rob’s website Ed's website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Free month of Brain.FM Episode 81 Episode 204 Episode 283 Full Transcript: Rob Marsh:  Today there are a bunch of podcasts about copyrighting, but when we started this show more than five years ago, that was not the case. Can you believe it's been five years by the way Kira? Seems like a long time. Kira Hug:  It seems like 25 years. Rob Marsh:  Yeah. At least. At least. Time flies when you're having fun. Back then, there were only a couple of people who recorded podcasts specifically to help copywriters get better at this thing that we all do and one of those people was copywriter and coach, Ed Gandia. Ed's been sharing what he's learned from being a copywriter for longer than we have. And like us, he's nearing almost 300 episodes of his show. Sometimes interviewing other successful writers and other times teaching important business skills. And today we thought we would invite him onto The Copywriter Club Podcast to talk about his business, how he got started as a copywriter, and what he does as a coach, and also to share his best advice for copywriters ready to build bigger, better businesses. Stick around because we think you're going to want to hear what he had to say. Kira Hug:  But first, this episode of the podcast is not sponsored by The Think Tank. Rob Marsh:  What? Kira Hug:  It's actually sponsored by the Copywriter Accelerator. A program designed to give you the blueprint, structure, coaching, challenges, and community you need to accelerate your business growth in four months so you can go from feeling like an overwhelmed freelancer to a fully booked business owner. If you have any interest in this program, you can jump on the waitlist to be the first to hear details about the program when it opens in August. We'll link to the wait list page in the show notes. Rob Marsh:  Yeah, you're definitely going to want to learn more about that. Okay. So let's get to our interview with Ed. Ed Gandia:  This is not what I necessarily wanted to do when I grew up. It's not that I didn't want to do it, but it's not something I thought of doing. I think so much of it stemmed from my success early on. I came from the corporate world. I was in software sales and in other sales environments. I was fortunate enough at the time ... I didn't think so, but I was fortunate enough to work for companies that really didn't do much for me in terms of providing me with marketing support. So I had to learn how to generate my own leads and find my own opportunities and a big part of that involved writing better marketing materials and sales letters and sales emails. And to me, it was really cool because that was selling on paper so to me it was still selling. Because of the way I am, I am intrigued by this idea. I want to get better. Some of what I'm doing is getting results, but I want to do better. And I started buying books and taking courses and didn't realize that what I was doing was this thing called copywriting. I was doing it, I just didn't know what it was called. And I recognized early on that this is something that I truly loved and I wanted to do more of. And then I recognized that this is something I actually could do as a business. I had set a goal sometime around that time in my career to within five years, go out on my own and do something. But I was thinking more like a traditional business. And when I started doing this, I realized, well, this could be my business. I could do this for other companies. So I started this business on the side and as I still had my full-time sales job, I started looking for prospects to help them create better landing pages and sales letters and sales emails, and lead-generating emails. And I knew that this is the direction I wanted to head in. I was able to go from a six-figure software sales job to a six-figure, full-time copywriting business in about 27 months. So because that happened so quickly and I was just talking to people who were doing similar work and they were asking me for advice, and I saw a pattern in terms of the questions people were asking. And I also noticed that so much of what I had learned in sales was directly applicable to building a profitable copywriting business. So I started putting together information and then I sold it. And that eventually led to a blog that I launched with two other guys. And then that led to a traditionally published book. And then that led to creating courses and selling those courses, and then that morphed into coaching. So that period was ... I went out on my own, 2006. I started my side business in 2003. And in 2008, I started publishing and selling information to help others with that transition from full-time work to full-time copywriting and then started coaching in 2012. So now that I think about it, it's been a long time. It doesn't feel like that long, but that's the long story or the long answer to your question. Rob Marsh:  Ed, I'm curious about that ramp-up period as you were switching from the sales career to a writing career. We've talked with people who have made it to six figures in the first year and then we've also talked to people who 've been doing this for five, six, maybe even longer years, and still haven't hit that six figures. So will you walk us through what it took? Three years feels like a really good number to be able to switch careers and make that. But what did you do to go from literally no copywriting to all copywriting and have it completely replace your previous career? Ed Gandia:  I think there were several things. And I will say that it wasn't linear. As you know, these things don't happen in a really neat fashion. It took me a long time to land my first client. My first real client. I landed a couple of really, really small clients that of course got me excited because somebody was actually paying me. But looking back, I really don't feel that those were my first real clients. It took me almost a year to land my first client. So out of 27 months, man, 12 months of that were ... I felt like I was getting nowhere. In terms of what I did, I think it's a combination of factors. One was I'm pretty good at just experimenting with ideas and then quickly deciding or realizing which ones work and then doing more of that and then refining that thing. So I'm pretty disciplined and I pay attention when it comes to those things. The other was the discipline of just having a schedule for myself and certain rules that I was going to follow. Because I couldn't slack off in my job and I couldn't afford to get fired. And in sales, your performance is measured quarterly so it's very easy to know if you're doing well or not. So I had to be very, very careful and I had to set a different schedule for myself, work long hours and then again, just keep doing the things that were working and trying new things and discarding those things that weren't working. And I think the biggest factor of all though is that I was highly motivated. So in my day job, once I decided that I was going to leave and just switch careers period, it's that weight off your shoulders. And then at that point, you're really not motivated to keep doing that work, but I had to. So I was really motivated to advance as quickly as possible so I could meet certain goals that I had set for myself. One of them being a certain level of savings so that I could quit my job comfortably and then another being, having so much income coming in on a regular basis part-time. So I was really driven by this idea of, I have to get out of here. I think that was really my biggest motivation when I think about it. Kira Hug:  I would love some specific examples from you as far as what was working in the early days as you were testing those different ideas. What started to work for you? And then fast forward to today,