Your Process is Your Product

The content marketer I was speaking with expressed a pressing concern:

“I’ve been in content marketing for years but don’t have a portfolio. What am I supposed to show to prospects?”

While she was already thinking about freelancing, a recent company downsizing event had accelerated her plans.

Over the last 5 years, she’d moved from content writing to content strategy as she was promoted into more senior roles.

Now, she needed a product to sell but had nothing tangible to show.

My advice to her was simple:

Stop focusing on selling a work product and sell your process.

Lots of marketers can produce a deliverable.

What sets you apart from everyone else is your process.

Selling a process is important because:

• It demonstrates you have a proven, reliable system for tackling a specific kind of problem
• It offers a differentiated point of view on how to reach an outcome
• Builds confidence in the quality of your output
• Allows you to assess the fit/alignment between your way of working and your client’s expectations
• Enables you to charge more by showing the steps involved

In short, your process establishes confidence in your competence.

Here’s an example:

Earlier this year, a company sought to sharpen its positioning amidst a changing competitive landscape.

I walked them through my process.

What did that look like?

I took them through the system I use from when the SOW is signed to when the engagement wraps up. It covers:

• My point of view on how positioning should be done
• How my approach differs from other philosophies
• The work and time involved in each phase
• What time and inputs would be required from their team
• The common pitfalls teams face along the way and how we overcome them, together
• How this process has worked time and time again in other businesses facing similar challenges

What I didn’t do was share examples of past positioning deliverables.

(Not only is that work product is confidential, prospects often lack the context and expertise to judge the work.)

But I didn’t need to.

By laying out a detailed process, the client was confident I had a proven system to deliver the output they needed to achieve their business goal.

Packaging Your Process.

Returning to my conversation with the new freelancer, she loved the idea of focusing on a process instead of simply a word product, and she saw how it could elevate her strategic value, but she now faced a new problem…

“I’m not sure I have a process.”

I reassured her she did. And I guarantee you do, too. You’re just not aware of it yet.

The best way to capture and systematize your process is by using the Camcorder Method, a simple strategy outlined by Dan Martell in his book “Buy Back Your Time.”

The camcorder method is simple:

1. Record yourself completing the project while voicing over what you're doing. (There are free screen recording tools like Vidyard or Loom you can use).
2. Transcribe the video so you have a script of the steps you followed.
3. Use AI (like ChatGPT) to create a 'standard operating procedure' from the transcript.​
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As I wrapped up my conversation with my new freelancing friend, she was excited.

We had determined that she had a unique point of view on how to build a content strategy that challenged some of the more conventional approaches.

She had started sketching out the high-level beats for mapping out a content strategy across a buyer journey. Her process was underway.

As she and I talked it through, she began to see how inputs to that process could spark new cross-sell and up-sell services for her one-woman content strategy consultancy.

This week, I challenge you to identify what service you could build a process around and follow the steps above to establish a system you can present to prospects in your sales calls.

Hit reply and let me know the one thing that resonated with you most this week. The newsletter is still in its early days, so I’d love your feedback.

-Jeff

Freelance Marketing Alliance

p.s. If you made it this far and want to see the process for my positioning projects that helped me close that deal, just reply, and I’ll send it your way.

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