TCC Podcast #309: Improving Your Customer Research Process with Melissa Harstine

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:
The Copywriter Think Tank
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
Melissa’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Free month of Brain.FM
Episode 12
Episode 28
Episode 154
The TCC Shop 

Full Transcript:

Kira Hug:  Customer research is one of those things all copywriters need to do in order to truly connect with the audiences we write for, but not all of us like doing it, and some clients hate paying for it. Doing it well can be a bit of a challenge. Today’s guest on the podcast is messaging strategist and copywriter, Melissa Harstine. She talked about how she went from a copywriter without a niche to specializing in customer research for a variety of clients, including other copywriters. As we talked, she shared her favorite interview questions, ideas for selling research to clients, and how she turns her research data into a strategy her clients can execute on. It’s a great interview you won’t want to miss.

Rob Marsh:  But first, this episode is sponsored by the Copywriter Underground. That’s the membership for ambitious and growing copywriters. As a member, you have access to copywriting and business training, group coaching calls, copy critiques, our bimonthly newsletter, and a lot more, all designed to help you grow your business. And if you join now, as in the week that we’re releasing this podcast, you not only get your first month for just $17, which is a screaming deal, but you’ll also get a hard copy of our 24-page Copywriter’s Definitive Guide to Pricing, which includes data about what copywriters of all experience levels are charging for 22 different project types, as well as things like the six figure niches and so much more. So go to Thecopywriterunderground.com to join now.

Kira Hug:  And if you want to get your first month for just $17, like Rob said, use the promo code, TRY IT, that’s all caps, TRY IT, and that will get you in for $17 for your first month. All right, let’s jump into the interview with Melissa.

Melissa Harstine:  Yeah, so I started my career actually as a journalist, and I was working at this little nonprofit newspaper for the elderly in Kansas. So it’s like a regional newspaper, super-niche, super specific audience, and there was a day that really stood out to me in that kind of season of my life. We got a letter from one of our readers, and she said, “I subscribe to more than 35 different newspapers and magazines, including AARP, Time, Newsweek, and your paper is the best and has the most helpful information for people like me.” Right? So we’re this little nonprofit newspaper in Kansas, and if you objectively held us up against Time or AARP, not going to win any awards, but what we had going for us is we knew our audience super well. We were out in the community knocking on doors, showing up at the senior center, having these conversations, and we were able to create this really valuable newspaper, this great writing, this great content because we knew our audience.

And so that was really the foundation for me in developing not only my interview skills but also I think just the ability to connect with people whose lives are so much different than my own, right? I’m 22 straight out of college, knocking on the doors of people who are my grandparents’ age, and they’re just like, “Kid, you’re so young. How do you write for us old people?” But it’s really fun now to kind of look back at my journey and see how that was the foundation for so many other things to come.

So fast forward a little bit, I ended up in a different type of nonprofit communications, ended up in burnout, like I think a lot of people do in that field, decided I wanted to work for myself, had that flexibility, that freedom, and started this local marketing studio. And so at that point, I was just kind of a generalist copywriter saying, “Yes,” to everything. Everything from, sure, Grandma Linda, I can set up your Facebook profile for you for five bucks, or whatever it is, to writing a whole website for $400, right? Kind of I think that’s a common thing that people go through as they’re growing their business and just learning what skillsets do I have. What needs are there in the market? How can I make this work?

Over time, I realized that I really wanted what now I would call a high-ticket productized service. I wouldn’t have called it that at the time, but basically, I wanted to be able to work more closely with maybe two to three clients a month at a higher price point. So instead of working with 14 to 17 clients at a time, feeling like I was pulled in all these different areas, doing all these different types of copy, and design, and marketing strategy, and whatever, really have this narrow-focused niche that allowed me to just make my business a lot easier to market, to sell, to deliver consistently. And so kind of through that transition from generalist marketer to more of a specific copywriter, at that point, I started doing website copy, case studies, some content, right?

And I think that was when I first met you guys in the Copywriter Accelerator, was when I was going through that transition from a local business to an online business in 2020, like many people were, trying to figure out now that my potential target market is a lot broader, how do I market myself effectively? And I knew that by being more focused, having this more specific target market, this more specific service, this niche, it was going to be a lot easier to sell one market effectively. And so cut again through this kind of continual years of experimentation, observing what’s in the market, going from general marketing to different types of copy, ended up in customer research, and it was really interesting how that happened.

I had been writing case studies for a while for Amisha Shrimanker. She’s one of my biz besties. I met her in the Copywriter Accelerator, and she was like, “Hey, Mel, you’re so good at these interviews. You ask questions I wouldn’t even think about asking. What would you think about doing the research for my upcoming launch copywriting project? My business is growing, I need support. I’m wondering if you’d do this with me.” And it never occurred to me until that moment that customer research was a service that I could offer to somebody else.

I was just like, “Wow, this is amazing,” because, again, I look back at my journey and these common threads, and it was doing interviews when I worked in the newspaper, doing interviews writing website copy, that was always kind of my approach to writing, to case studies, all of these different things, and at the right moment, the pieces came together, and I found this really unique micro niche that was not only a perfect fit for my talent stack, my skillset, my vision for my business, but also honestly an untapped space in the market.

I know of some exclusive researchers who are working in the e-commerce space, and tech, and SaaS, and corporate verticals, but I really don’t know anyone else who does just research for service providers, or course traders, program leaders, and such. I mean, I know some copywriters are starting to offer customer research or market research as an additional package, and I’m sure we’ll get into that later as well, but really this was a way for me to show up, add value in a way that fit my skills, and just really was a way to meet a need in the market.

Rob Marsh:  Okay. That’s amazing. I mean, just following a career from one point to the next point, to the next point, and I want to step back before we get into all of the client research stuff, but as you launched your business, started this generalist agency, micro-agency of your own, I’m really curious, how did you start finding those first clients, especially coming out of a different kind of job or a different situation where you’re totally burned out? How do you get excited, and get out there, and attract the right clients for your business?

Melissa Harstine:  Yeah, what worked for me is I joined a local business networking group. And I would say for the first three years of my business, probably 80% of my leads came through that group, and so I was just showing up every day or once a week, building relationships, having kind of these one to one type coffee chats outside of the weekly meeting. And just through that, doing really good work, people getting my name out there, people becoming familiar with what I do. And so that really became my strategy as well when I took my business online too, because at first it’s like everybody says, “Write all these social media posts, send out emails, focus on visibility,” and sometimes those what I would call mass marketing strategies or traffic based strategies just weren’t quite working for me.

So it was going back to my roots, like what has always again been that common denominator for me? It’s having these more intimate one-to-one conversations with people, whether it’s in a DM, at a coffee shop, on a podcast even. How can I leverage that relationship-building strength in different ways in different seasons of my business?

Kira Hug:  I want to hear more about how to ask better questions because that’s clearly your specialty. As podcasters, we can always get better at asking better questions. So what do you think you’re doing that maybe other copywriters aren’t doing during the research phase?

Melissa Harstine:  I think one thing is I have a set list of questions that I start with every time, but then I modify it for each interview, right? Sorry for each project. So I kind of know I want to find out what state of mind was this person in before they decided to invest in this program, kind of what are the pain points and desires. Getting at those things, but then by customizing my list of questions to the person, to the moment, I’m able to really dig deeper, and so sometimes… Let me back up. I think really a key piece of it is just leading with empathy and paying attention to the person who’s in the room.

So sometimes I’ll notice that someone is kind of quiet and not really opening up, and so I’ll try to just insert myself in the conversation a little bit, and be like, “Oh yeah. I remember that happened to me too,” or, “That feels exactly what I’m struggling with in my business right now.” And it’s almost like that shared sense of humanity kind of you can almost see this sigh happening, and they start to just relax, and ease into the conversation a little bit more, and feel like, “Okay, I can trust you. I can share more of my deeper self with you.” And I really think beyond just the questions I’m asking, it’s how I’m connecting with people.

I had someone recently that was a little bit more closed off, and I couldn’t quite get a read on her, and eventually, she was just like, “Melissa, just tell me what you need. Just get straight to the point,” and that’s not my personality at all, but I was just like, “Okay, now I know how to respond to this.” And I asked more direct questions instead of trying to come around the bush, not be leading or whatever. So that’s probably my biggest recommendation is just learning those human skills and responding to kind of someone’s tone of voice, or words, or expression, nonverbal cues, et cetera.

Rob Marsh:  So given what you just said, this is probably a really bad question, because you’re basically saying, “Hey, it’s not the questions,” but I would like to know, do you have some standard questions that you start with, that you get that conversation going, and then follow the rabbit trail where it goes, or is it all organic?

Melissa Harstine:  Yeah. The question I always start off with is, “Take me back to the day when you first realized that you needed support with X, Y, Z, or you first realized that this thing wasn’t working for you. What was happening?” And the reason that question works so well is that it really anchors the person who’s being interviewed at a specific point in time, like, “Take me back to the day when.” The next part of that question is, “When you first realized,” and so sometimes off the top of their head, they may not be able to say, “When I first realized this thing,” but they kind of verbal process or talk their way into it, and so you can kind of follow that thread as they’re speaking, which reveals more into kind of that customer journey I think, which is really cool. And then the last half of that question is, “You first realize you needed support with,” whatever the thing is that the interview is about, that topic, right?

Because again, it’s like, what is that mindset, that mental process that’s going into that kind of, “Oh, I need this, I need to buy this,” right? So that question is phrased really well to kind of dig up what was happening, but it also just kind of sets me at ease, because if I ask the same first question every time, I don’t even have to think about it. I just kind of ask it on autopilot and go from there. One of the follow-up questions or two of the follow-up questions I’ve been asking recently that have been going really well are, “What changed to make it a priority at that time?” Because that kind of shows you that moment of heightened emotion, that urgency, like what’s at stake, or I’ll sometimes ask, “What makes this thing you just shared so frustrating?”

And it’s amazing. That word, frustrating, triggers something I think in the person, and they just get more animated and really kind of dig into more of that agitation type of language that we can use in our copy, so that works really well. One of the other questions I ask is, “Give me an example of something you’re able to do now that you couldn’t do before,” and I love that question because it kind of shows the transformation. It shows the before and after in a very concrete, specific way. And then the last question I always ask is just, “Is there anything else on your mind that you’d like to share with me today?”

And then I have to zip my lips and pause because usually, they’ll say, “Oh, I think we’ve covered it all,” but if I pause 20 seconds, they’ll usually go, “Oh, wait, there was this one thing I wanted to mention.” And sometimes, it ends up being the most helpful off-the-wall type thing I heard the entire conversation, but it was just giving them space to speak freely that that came up. And so that’s been a really important and effective strategy I think for me.

Kira Hug:  Okay. I’m going to use those questions on you towards the end of this interview. So I want to talk about the package and what you include in this, I don’t know what you’re calling it, but customer research package. What does that entail? Tell us a little bit more about that.

Melissa Harstine:  Yeah, so over the past year and a half, I’ve had two different packages I’ve been offering. One is kind of a white label package where I’m doing research for other copywriters or occasionally for a brand strategist. And so in that case, I’m just doing a piece of a bigger project. They’re delegating not only the interviews to me, but also kind of some of that thinking, right? It’s the initial thinking and analysis that needs to happen before writing copy. And so that package includes five customer interviews, the written transcripts, the links to all the Zoom video recordings, a really in-depth research report, and kind of a kickoff call and research review call. And so that price is currently at $2,300.

I do sometimes do survey analysis in addition to that, not creating the survey but looking at a survey that already exists. Where I’m really focusing on growing my business now is continuing to focus on this customer insights package. And so that’s why I’m working directly with a course creator, a service provider, a marketer to dig in and understand their audience. And for me ,it’s really an opportunity to solve bigger problems, because when I’m partnering with copywriters, it’s let’s take this thing, and optimize it, or make it work better, but when I’m working directly with entrepreneurs, it’s often something… This used to be selling. It’s no longer selling. I don’t know why. Let’s go try to talk to your customers and figure that out, or we want to add this new course. We want to pivot this thing we’re already doing, and we don’t have time to waste, especially with this looming recession. So let’s go talk to our customers and get these leads and these insights a lot faster.

So again, kind of going back to the package itself, the base package is very similar where I’m doing five interviews, the video links, the transcripts, the research report, kind of a customized action plan with top recommendations, but then I also tend to do a lot more additional data mining, especially if they have an onboarding form that a bunch of their customers or students have filled out, or some kind of a project debrief form to really dig into customers’ language and emotions at different points in that journey with this client. And so those projects tend to be more like $3,500 to $5,000 apiece.

Rob Marsh:  Okay. I’m going to be the master of questions that maybe you’ve already answered today, because as you’re talking about this, it sort of feels like I understand the value that you’re bringing to the table, but also when copywriters try to sell research, a lot of them struggle, because it’s so hard to demonstrate the value that you bring, or the end result, or how that translates to money. And so we like to see research paired with some other deliverable, but you have done a really good job of figuring out how to sell it on its own. And so I’m curious about your thoughts. As you’re having that conversation with your client. As you were writing your website, all those times when you get to discuss what you bring to the table, how do you make it crystal clear that this is worth paying for aside from the other copy stuff that has to happen?

Melissa Harstine: That is the million-dollar question, and something I’m still experimenting with and trying to figure out even better. I recently hired a business consultant coach to work with me, because I found that while I was doing an okay job expressing that value to especially that customer insights package where I’m working one to one with my clients, it wasn’t working as well as it could, I guess. I was getting leads, but maybe they were a little bit confused about exactly what the outcome would be. It was either someone that said, “Yes,” right away or they were a prospect for two to six months before they finally said, “Yes,” right? And so I’m like, “Something is off here. I need to get better at understanding more clearly my target market, my message, my unique value proposition and all of that.”

So my current hypothesis pending more testing and research for myself, is that the problems I’m able to uniquely solve are course creators and service providers who their annual revenue is between $750,000 and $2 million because they’re able to afford my services, and while they may have a marketing department in-house, they don’t yet have someone that’s specifically doing research or maybe even not research alongside copy, right? So big enough to have the budget for research, but not so big that they can do it themselves. The other piece of it is that the problems I’m solving for them are they’ve been selling something. It’s not selling as well as it used to; they don’t know why. They are pivoting their course, their service, or adding something new, and they want to get more of those qualified leads faster, or just general optimization. We need more qualified leads, we need more sales to support our business growth, so let’s go in and do this research to get these insights straight from our customer’s mouths.

Now, I have also been experimenting with kind of, I guess, an add on or upsell is not quite the right word, but once I finish the research, doing a copy review call where I will look at something that they or their team have written and kind of get feedback like, “Okay, remember we had this really great testimonial? We want to make sure that we pull in here. This particular headline is not quite working, because it’s touching on something that matters to your customers, but it’s not the primary thing, so why don’t we try tweaking it like this?” And I think that has really helped me start to bridge the gap between the research that I’m doing and the implementation that they and their team are doing.

Kira Hug:  So I know you have transitioned from white labeling and selling this package to copywriters, and now you’re focused on a different market, but can we go back to that copywriter piece? Because a lot of copywriters we know are also white labeling and selling offers to other copywriters, so can you just talk about some of the pros and cons of doing that, especially for people who are thinking about doing that?

Melissa Harstine:  Yeah, I think one of the biggest pros for me was having a recurring revenue stream. So when I was just writing website copy or case studies, those were project-based work. And while someone might come back to me in two or three years and ask me to redo their website, update it, or come back to me and ask me to write more case studies, it wasn’t recurring. I couldn’t depend on that, and sometimes the ups and downs in cash flow, like those feast or famine cycles were really hard for me, especially when there were these other things happening in the market and the world as a whole that made everybody kind of nervous and scared the last two years of our lives. And so for me, partnering with two copywriters in particular on a regular basis means that I always have one to two projects a month that are coming in, and so that’s been very really beneficial for me.

One of the things that I learned as I was starting and growing that particular service, the white label service, is that if I was working with copywriters who were selling projects that were between 10 to 15 K, so launch strategy website copy, bigger website copy projects, it was easier for them to bring me on, right? Because if I’m selling a service at $2,000, that’s over 20% of their total profits for that package, but if I was trying to sell that same service to a website copywriter who’s selling their package for $3,000 to $5,000, it just didn’t make sense financially for them to bring me on at that price point. And so I think realizing that went a long way in me being more focused and clear on who I was connecting with and reaching out to when pitching my services.

And so that’s something I would recommend for other copywriters who are offering similar types of services to others… as a white label type of thing, whether it’s copywriters, or brand strategists, or whoever, is thinking what percentage of the overall project scope is your fee? And kind of I think that 10% to 20% point is kind of the sweet point for me.

Rob Marsh:  So as you’ve started to shift away from that audience then, and looking at this other audience, entrepreneurs, course creators that you can help solve bigger problems, how has that changed your business, both the size and type of project that you’re working on, the financials that go along with it? Have things gone better? Is it a struggle? How has the change gone?

Melissa Harstine:  Yeah, so I was overbooked at the beginning of the year, which was great, and then things really slowed down this summer. And so I think there’s just some natural seasonality to my business that I’ve noticed over the last few years, but that said, that also has motivated me a little bit more to make this shift, because I am selling those packages directly to entrepreneurs at a little bit higher price point, which can help even out some of those, help make up for, I guess, some of those lower months. So that’s been really beneficial. I think probably the best thing for me has been this sense of joy in the impact that my research insights are able to make when I’m working with a bigger company, right?

So I recently partnered with Jordan Gill at Systems Save Me. Her Done in a Day program teaches people how to start and create VIP days, and they had had this same message for three years that was working really, really well. It was something like, “Replace your monthly retainers with VIP days, work with clients four days a month.” But all of a sudden they noticed two things. One is that they were starting to attract a different type of client to their program, and number two, they did the survey and found out that most people that were joining their program were no longer replacing their other offers with the VIP day, but adding a VIP day to their offer suite.

And so when we were working together, it was kind of to understand those things, because they knew their message needed to shift, and there were also some pieces of their offer strategy and their marketing strategy that needed to shift along with it, and I remember Jordan’s phrase very clearly. She’s like, “It feels like moving the Titanic, because this message has worked so well for us for the last few years, and now it needs to change.” And so the reason that project was such a joy for me is because I was able to see her LinkedIn strategist and ghostwriter used that research report to create some new content and copy. Their social media team used it. Their growth marketing manager used that report. Jordan and her project manager used it on a really high strategic level. Their sales team has been using it. Their coaching team has been using it, right?

All these different arms in their business were able to take these insights and apply them in different ways. I’ve seen changes in how they’re positioning their conference that they do twice a year. I’ve seen changes in some of the offer itself. They have created a new thing. I think it’s called Upfront Upsell, where it’s a way for people to use a VIP day to sell a high-ticket service instead of using a low-ticket product as the upsell into a higher-price offer. It’s been really cool to start to see how broadly these research insights can impact the business, and how many different departments and people within the business are able to really benefit from them, and I love being able to work with people on that level.

Kira Hug:  Maybe this is getting too in the weeds, and maybe you’re not able to share this, but because Jordan has been on the show, and she spoke at TCC IRL, I’m just curious if you can share how did that come about? Did you pitch Jordan? Was it a connection? How did you land that project?

Melissa Harstine:  Yeah, it was kind of twofold. Number one is that we had connected on Instagram maybe a couple of years ago. I think the initial conversation started just because I admired her work, and then also she had gone to college in Kansas. So we had that kind of natural geographic connection because there aren’t a lot of people from Kansas it feels like, but also she heard me speak about case studies on the Boss Project Strategy Hour podcast. About a year before, she’d reached out to me about doing case studies initially. And so I said, “Hey, I’m not offering that service anymore, but here’s what I’m doing, and here’s how I think I can still help you.”

And to be honest, that was a scary moment to be like, “Oh my gosh, here’s this person that I love her work. She’s like this big name in my industry. Am I really going to tell her, ‘No I can’t help you with case studies. I’m not doing that anymore’? But I took a couple days to kind of think about it, and I was like, “No, I’m going to trust my gut. I’m going to trust this new direction I’m going and say, ‘I really think I can help you in this way,'” and that was how I landed that project. And so it was not an overnight thing. It was this relationship that had been growing over a year and a half, two years, and the podcast I had been on almost a year before, but that fruit came over time.

Rob Marsh:  Let’s break in here for just a moment and mention a couple of the things that stand out. So, Kira, I’m curious, where do you think copywriters can improve their research process, or how they’re selling research, or any of the things that Melissa was just telling us about?

Kira Hug:  Well, there’s always room for improvement in the questions that we’re asking. So I feel like this episode was such a great steal as far as like I’m going to borrow all those questions Melissa shared with us, because they’re better than my questions, and I really like the questions I ask, but I feel like Melissa has taken them and improved the questions I typically ask to make them even more powerful and to pull in better insights and voice of customer from her prospects. So those questions, totally worth grabbing. I also liked her advice around asking the same questions, at least at the start of a customer interview or even a client interview when you have a kickoff call, to not be afraid to just standardize some of your questions, so that it’s automatic. You probably will feel less stressed out, because you won’t feel like, “Ah, I have to reinvent the wheel every single time I sit down to talk with a customer.”

And I think sometimes we feel like we have to get an A+ on the customer interview, so we have to reinvent everything every time we do it. And Melissa is just reminding us, no, actually you’ll do a better job if you just ask the same questions, and then that gives you space to really listen and not stress out about what question you’re going to ask next.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, it was interesting. I kind of had an aha as I was listening to Melissa talk about those questions, those specific questions, because it dawned on me, and this is probably a no duh for most people that are listening, but for some reason it was something that just clicked for me, and it’s not that she was listening for specific language necessarily for each of the questions that she was asking, but rather she was looking for ideas around the customer journey. She mentioned mindset and mental processes when she was talking about that first question that she asked, and then some of the follow up questions she mentioned specifically she’s looking for things where there’s heightened emotion, or agitation, or where she can pick up on the transformation or missing information that she didn’t know to ask about.

And oftentimes, I think I kind of kernelize it as I’m asking questions, and I’m looking for language or specific ideas that maybe resonate with me, or I think, “Oh, that’ll make a good headline,” but it’s just a nice reminder to go level deeper looking for the emotion, the psychological hit, or the thing that’s underlying the language, because that’s where the real power is.

Kira Hug:  Yeah, I mean, it’s really just thinking at a deeper level about what they’re saying to you and using our skillset as creatives and strategists to connect all the dots. And so not just to swipe the copy or swipe what they’re saying, but to think about what it really means, and what it’s indicating, and draw some conclusions from that, and really treat it almost like you’re a scientist approaching this new problem that you’re solving. And so I think Melissa is going a lot deeper, and so that part was inspiring, and she’s got the great tools to do it. As far as how she interviews, I like that she figures out their own style when she’s interviewing a customer, and sometimes people are a little bit more direct, and they just want you to be direct with them, and other people might not appreciate that. And so part of our job if we’re interviewing someone is to make sure that we’re kind of making them feel comfortable, really extracting the most valuable information from that interview in a short period of time, because we usually don’t have more than 30 minutes.

You have to be really quick and effective at what you’re doing, and so the best way to do that is to mirror their own style and their own communication method. And so that’s something that I feel like we haven’t talked about as much on the podcast. We just talk about the questions you should ask but less about how to approach them, so you can build that relationship quickly.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. There’s a lot of psychology around mirroring the people that you’re talking to, and especially if you’re doing this on a video call, mirroring behaviors, actions, those kinds of things actually creates a really deep personal connection between people, and I mean, pay attention when you’re sitting with somebody one-on-one, notice that when they sit forward, you kind of have the urge to also sit forward, or if they fold their arms, you might fold your arms, or if you lean back, and put your hands behind your head, they’ll do the same kind of thing. We do this naturally as humans, and so just mirroring back behaviors, ideas, thoughts, words, all of that actually helps create that connection with people as we’re interviewing them. It can really help get to the deeper answers that we’re looking for.

Kira Hug:  Rob, what are you doing right now? I’m going to mirror you right now.

Rob Marsh:  I’m leaning forward with all kinds of excitement to talk into…

Kira Hug:  I am too.

Rob Marsh:  Usually we have video on, but we don’t have video on right now, and so I can’t see what Kira is doing.

Kira Hug:  Yeah, it’s Friday, and I said, “No video today,” but I’m also leaning forward, so right now Rob and I are mirroring each other, and that’s why this conversation is going so well. So we’re going to keep doing that.

Rob Marsh:  So I also asked Melissa a little bit about just how you sell research. This has kind of been an ongoing theme for a lot of copywriters that we’ve talked to. It’s really difficult to sell it, especially on its own, but even sometimes when we’ve included it in a package of our own or other copywriters who do it, oftentimes a copywriter will come back and say, “Yeah, can I save $1,500, or $2,500, or whatever if we don’t do the research part?” And I guess there are really a couple of ways to deal with those kinds of objections. One is don’t break it out in your proposals, and I don’t think you do that.

I actually do have it as a line item in my proposals, but, Kira, I’m pretty sure don’t, and it just kind of erases that. It’s like there’s nothing you even discuss about that, but also if people come back to you and object to paying for research, you can just insist, “This is part of my process. If I don’t have this, I can’t do a great job for you. I can’t find the ideas that are going to resonate with your clients.” Occasionally, clients will have research that’s already been done for them, and of course, take a look at that, make sure that it could work for you if you’re going to incorporate that, and that may save some time that you don’t have to repeat that research process, but if you’re going to do that, also make sure that the research they’ve got is the kind of research you need in order to find the ideas and do the work that you need to do.

Kira Hug:  Yeah, that’s well said. Melissa talked about connecting with potential clients through local business networks, and that has worked really well for her. I was just wondering, Rob, if that is something that you do? Has that been something that you kind of pull in as well as your networking?

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, she basically said that the mass attraction idea, emailing a ton of people, or showing up in a group, or whatever, that doesn’t necessarily work for her, and one-on-one relationship building is really effective. I have done some of that. I happen to live in a place where there are a lot of SaaS companies, a lot of technical and technological companies, and so I have been to some events and met people that way, introduced myself, and that has turned into a few projects, but it’s not the main way that I find clients, and so it does work. I think it’s actually really nice to hear Melissa’s approach and say, “Hey, in addition to all of the other things that we have suggested, everything from what we teach in the P7 Pipeline Course, all about mass outreach and MVP pitching, as well as the really effective goat pitches, things like that, sometimes just the one-on-one connections work too.” And I think you’ve done some of that too, right?

Kira Hug:  I did BNI in Manhattan, and actually it was a great experience, and I met a ton of people, and then eventually stopped because my business was getting too full, I guess, and so I didn’t need it anymore. It was also an early morning, and I was not into that, but I’m all for it. And now that I’m in Maine and trying to build a network here, I mean, a personal network and a professional one, I’m going to start doing it now just so I can start building the local network and just see where it goes. I don’t need to land a ton of projects, but I want to just start building that for just long-term gain and also to make some friends. I’m more into it for friendship than anything else.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, I mean, we’ve talked a lot about in our programs, whatever, there’s this idea that networking is difficult or especially for introverts, but if we reframe it, think a little bit more about making friends, creating relationships, whether that turns into work or not, just knowing that you have people out there, who like you’re saying, you can say, “Hi,” to, you can share resources with, you can reach out to with questions, whatever. All of those things are good. Everybody should be doing that, and sometimes it turns into work.

Kira Hug:  Okay, well let’s get back into the interview with Melissa and find out how she found her perfect fit niche.

Rob Marsh:  Melissa, I’m curious, as you’ve sort of moved through your business and gone from one thing to the next, and you’ve found this niche, this micro-niche, this specialty that you have, could you have found that without working with the community that you mentioned, that you found the accelerator with Amisha, going through that process? Would you have found this naturally, or did you have to go through certain steps to get there? And I guess the reason that I’m asking is because so many of us struggle to find a niche that we just absolutely love, or that we can go all the way in, and we kind of dabble here and there. So I’m just curious about that process for you. What had to happen for you to get where you are?

Melissa Harstine:  Yeah, that was definitely a struggle for me. It was like I wanted to have this niche. Not only because I heard people say things like, “If you have a niche, you’ll be more profitable. It’d be easier to sell and deliver.” There were logical reasons for it, but I also just knew it suited my personality, and I wanted it so badly. I remember being in the Copywriter Accelerator and looking at all these things like, “I could write website copy. I could work with artisans, I could work with creatives.” All these different kind of areas I was experimenting with, but like I said, it really wasn’t until Amisha approached to me and said, “Hey, would you be interested in doing this,” that I was like, “Wow, the