TCC Podcast #137: What Copywriters Need to Know about Sales with Austin Mullins

Copywriter and entrepreneur, Austin Mullins, is our guest for the 137th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. We’ve known Austin for quite a while now and the more we heard him talk about his sales process, the more we knew we needed to have him share his process with the club. We covered a lot of ground—especially about sales processes—in this one, here’s a good list of most of what we talked about: •  how Austin became a copywriter in high school •  why he thinks it was a mistake (for him) to attend college •  what he did to find good clients beyond Upwork •  the #1 thing he did to grow his business—it has to do with sales •  why he chose the niche he is in and how it changed his business •  how he split his time between three “jobs” at the same time •  his “ideal” client acquisition process and selling on the phone •  what to do to encourage referrals or testimonials •  the mistakes copywriters make on sales calls (and how to fix them) •  what it means to be a growth strategist—and how to “do” strategy •  what his process for working with content clients looks like •  an in-depth review of what the sales process should look like •  how to teach yourself to “sell” To hear this one—and if you struggle with sales you definitely want to hear this one, click the play button below or download the episode to your podcast app. Readers scroll down for a full transcript.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: The Copywriter Accelerator The Copywriter Think Tank Danny Marguiles Joel Klettke SPIN Selling Austin’s website Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity   Full Transcript: Rob:   This podcast is sponsored by The Copywriter Underground. Kira:   It's our new membership designed for you to help you attract more clients and hit 10k a month consistently. Rob:   For more information or to sign up, go to thecopywriterunderground.com. What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That's what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira:   You're invited to join the club for episode 137 as we chat with copywriter Austin Mullins about what he does as a growth strategist for B2B SaaS companies, how he attracts and closes leads, what it's like to build an agency, and the challenges of investing his time in more than one business at once. Welcome, Austin. Rob:   Hey, Austin. Austin:           Thanks for having me, guys. Longtime fan of the podcast, so excited to be here. Kira:   Great to have you here, Austin. As one of our former Accelerator members and now a Think Tank member. It's about time we had you on the show, so let's start with your story. How did you end up as a copywriter and growth strategist? Austin:           Yeah. I started a bit early, so I first started doing a little bit of copywriting work in high school, actually. Stumbled across Upwork, which I know is often a dirty word around these parts but stumbled upon there and was interested in this freelancing thing. I had always been good at academic writing but didn't particularly enjoy it, but stumbled across this term, copywriting and started to do some really low-level work like helping people write reviews and such at first, and then gradually worked my way up to being a generalist copywriter, who would write blog content for all sorts of businesses, brochures, a little bit of web copy in there but not web copy done the right way with lots of customer research. Then did that for a while. Made the mistake of letting my family convince me I should go to college, and so, business dropped off. Then when I tried to get back into it, things didn't pick up quite as quickly as I thought they would,