A while back, I found myself in a bit of a jam.
I had 7 clients approach me about new projects, and all 7 accepted my proposals. I was pretty aggressive with my pricing, so I was only expecting about 5 of the 7 to sign.
Normally, I wouldn’t complain. It’s great to be busy! But several of these were huge projects, and all of them meant lots of discussion over email, phone, and video calls.
How was I going to get it all done?
I’m a huge fan of automation and lifehacks. I have tools that automatically send invoices to my retainer clients every month. I’ve automated and outsourced things like accounting, scheduling, and contracts. If it’s possible to cut down the time I spend doing a repetitive task, I’m in!
But one thing I didn’t think was possible to cut: client meetings.
Then I remembered that a friend of mine had recently introduced me to Loom, a free service for recording and sharing videos.
How did Loom help?
Most phone and video meetings last between 15 minutes and 1 hour. There’s a lot of small talk. Somebody’s video cuts out. And now that many of us are working from home, there are fresh new distractions.
The truth is that your clients dread Zoom calls as much as you do. So instead of scheduling a meeting for every key discussion, I decided to try pre-recording demos, design discussions, and responses to client questions for the entire month.
When a client asked a question or I needed to demonstrate a design or piece of functionality, I recorded and sent a video through Loom.
Suddenly, conversations that would have taken an hour took just a few minutes. And my clients loved it! Rather than fitting in yet another meeting, they could watch my Loom videos whenever they wanted.
🔥 I estimate I eliminated about 70% of my meetings that month!
My Loom experiment also let me decrease the number of emails I had to write and respond to, which saved me even more time.
And I’ve never looked back.
While I’m always happy to jump on a phone call if it makes sense, some things just don’t require one. And some communication is actually better asynchronously. If a client needs time to think about something, it’s a huge waste of their time to have a meeting to just discuss that they’ll need to think about it.
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