Before You Start: Upskill Yourself In These 3 Essential Skills

Start a Drop Servicing Agency: The 3 Skills You Must Learn

No matter what endeavor you decide to take in life – there’s a very good chance you’ll need a set of skills. 

Drop servicing is no different. In fact, even if you decide to set up a: 

• Dropshipping store
• Affiliate marketing website
• Amazon FBA business
• **ENTER ANY BUSINESS MODEL HERE**

…in order to succeed you’re going to need to upgrade your skills. 

Now, while there are a whole bunch of high-income skills that will help you on your journey, there are 3 skills you absolutely need if you want to turn your drop servicing idea into a successful agency. 

Think of it this way…

I’ve learned over the years that the amount of money you make is directly related to two things:

1. The quality of skills you acquire
2. And your ability to sell effectively 

The skills you acquire can range from high-income skills such as web design to ‘soft’ skills such as teamwork and adaptability. 

The key thing to note here is that you need to acquire your skills and ‘stack’ them on top of each other. 

Second, your ability to sell will be the difference between making no money and making a shit tonne of money. 

The 3 Most Important Skills To Start Learning Today

Specifically, before you go ahead and set up your pretty little website. Before you start thinking about all the things you can do with your extra income. Before anything…

…there are 3 skills you need to start learning if you are going to see any success in the business world – drop servicing or otherwise. And they are…

The Skill You’re Selling

Skill #1: Marketing

In simple terms, marketing is the decisions, tasks, and activities you undertake to promote your product or service. 

There are two umbrella terms to think about when it comes to marketing: 

The ‘Push’ and ‘Pull’ of Marketing

Inbound is the opposite. If outbound is the ‘push’ then inbound marketing is the ‘pull’. 

So which one should you choose? 

Well, personally I prefer inbound marketing myself. It makes everything else in the process a lot easier. However, there are a lot of benefits (mainly, higher-paying clients) to having an outbound strategy. 

The best recipe of course will be to mix and match both of them together in order to gain clients. 

Skill #2: Sales

I’ll admit, I slept on this for too long. 

I’m much more of a marketing guy than I am a sales guy. However, since developing my sales skills my income has multiplied 10-fold. 

Sales is the ability to effectively sell your product or service to an interested prospect. 

Now, sales have a notoriously bad reputation. When we think of sales we often think of snakey individuals who’ll tell you anything just to grab the sale. 

And, I’ll be honest, that’s the reason I stayed away from sales for so long. 

But, when you start to understand sales on a deeper level, you’ll start to realize the very best salespeople are not only great at positioning their product or service in a way that the prospect desires – but, they do it from a place of genuine honesty. 

For me, the main objective of sales is to find the right prospects for what I’m offering. Once I’ve got that, the secondary goal is to frame the sales talk in a way that relates to each prospect’s individual needs and wants. 

And third, the objective is to ensure that I deliver a service so good, they’ll come back to me at a later date for more work. 

This ensures I not only make money on the front-end but on the back-end too. One-off sales a great, but you can’t build a scalable business that lasts very long without repeat customers. And if you do, you’ll be doing a LOT of work. 

As you see, sales isn’t just sales. 

It’s a deeper connection with yourself, your product or service, and your prospect’s deepest needs, wants, and desires – for the long haul. 

There are 7 principles, you must understand in order to improve your sales game: 

• #1: Speak to the right people
• #2: Understand your prospects and what their ‘key drivers’ are
• #3: Approach your prospects understanding what needs to be said – and what doesn’t
• #4: Lead your prospect down your sales funnel with minimal friction 
• #5: Ask the right questions
• #6: Listen more than you talk 
• #7: Handle objections like a pro
• #8: Understand and use the most effective closing strategies
• #9: Follow up

In fact, each of these principles falls into one or more of the steps you’ll find in the most common sales process:

• Prospecting
• Prepare & Plan 
• Your Approach
• Your Message
• Handling Objections
• Closing 
• Following Up

Understanding sales and how it can literally change your life can be the difference between failure and success. The important thing here is to understand the process, then adapt it to suit your individual style. 

You don’t want to come off as a robot but at the same time, you don’t want to come across as some needy salesperson either. 

Find what works for you, deploy it, test it, and tweak it as you go along. 

I’d recommend at least having a basic knowledge of what you’re trying to sell. 

Why? Well, once you’ve outsources your work to another freelancer and passed that finished work over to your client – how do you actually know the work is of the highest standard? 

You don’t need to be a master in the skill. That’s what outsourcing is for. 

But, you do have to have at least some knowledge in that skill. Whether it’s a digital marketing skill, accountancy skill, web design, video marketing – whatever it is, I’d recommend having at least some sort of knowledge in the area. 

There’s another benefit to at least knowing something about what you’re selling – lowering your costs. 

Here’s what I mean, by understanding social media marketing, for example, you’ll know what tasks are absolutely essential and which aren’t. This, allows you to then streamline your delivery process and save money too. 

So instead of paying a freelancer $500 / month to manage a client’s social media account, you can cut the unnecessary and maybe pay them $300 / month. Banking you an additional $200/ month in profit. 

Not only that, but you’ll also be able to give better instructions, understand your client’s needs better and deliver a much better service all round. 

Do you need to be a master before you start? Absolutely not. But you do need to have at least some knowledge in what you’re selling and be working towards understanding that skill on a deeper level throughout time.