In this tutorial Matt Ragland first addresses a mindset hurdle, urging creative freelancers to stop waiting for perfection and to adopt a "ship early, ship often" attitude. He then walks viewers through building a complete client‑service sales funnel using ConvertKit. The funnel starts with a website form that captures interested prospects, triggers a three‑email sequence that introduces the service, explains the process, and eventually presents a payment link. He demonstrates how to tag contacts (e.g., Sketch Note Project, SaaS Buyer) to segment them, set up automation rules, and integrate MoonClerk for handling deposits ($500) and full payments. Pricing options are shown: a $1,000 project with a $500 deposit and a $50 quick‑sketch add‑on. The sequence also includes a case‑study email with testimonials to provide social proof. Throughout, he references downloadable email scripts, and later points viewers to his 4W and GRID method for client communication. The video ends with calls to subscribe, comment, and follow him on Twitter.
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Hey everyone, hope you're doing well today. I want to talk about two things with you today. The first one is very short and it's about mindset. The second thing, and maybe the more freelance creative process that I want to talk to you about, is how do you set up your first sales funnel? And I'm thinking about this specifically from a service perspective. So if you are a web designer, like for me doing sketchnotes, how do you bring in clients and kind of cultivate them through a sales funnel before getting them to pay you money for the service that you offer. The first thing that I want to talk about though, and it's really quick, if you don't want to watch this, just skip ahead like a minute, minute and a half, 2 minutes at the most until you see like a screencast of the actual sales funnel. But what I want to talk to you about really quick is something that I've been thinking about and it's mindset because it's been maybe about 10 days since I shipped the vlog and that's longer than it needs to be. I've had this specific sales funnel idea in my head for several weeks and just haven't shipped it yet. I've gotten myself in the incorrect mindset of thinking that something has to be perfect. Do we have the kind of good taste that allows us to see what is really good, maybe what is perfect or really close to being there? Yeah, hopefully that's the case. Ira Glass, which I'm going to link to above, Maybe it's over here, to a talk that he did about having good taste. But let me tell you this, if you're just getting started or you're really early in the process, what matters is creating that process, is having the discipline of continuing to ship and being consistent with it.
Throughout that, you'll develop your taste.
The things that take you a really long time to do and maybe keep you delayed from actually shipping, those things that take a long time for me or for you right now, those won't take as long the more practice you have, the more that you develop your process, and the better that you get at shipping, okay? So that's what I want to encourage you on. Don't worry about being perfect, just go ahead and keep shipping. Make sure that the practice and the discipline is there to keep shipping. If you want to hear more about this, I have some other thoughts percolating on it, but it's not the primary topic of this episode. But go ahead and let me know in the comments if you have any struggles with like continuing to ship on your projects, or just the continual process of like, I'm gonna have a vlog out, I'm gonna have a blog post out, I'm going to like make this thing every single day, every single week, whatever it might be. Please make a comment below. I'd love to hear how you're kind of going through some of those processes. The second and primary thing that I want to talk to you about is how can you create a useful sales funnel for your creative service, whether that is art, sketchnotes, illustration, design, web design, anything like that, even coaching, consulting, if you are specifically selling some kind of service to the customer, how can you develop that? How can you cultivate that with a follow-up sales funnel? Normally we think about sales funnels when it comes to like an ebook or a course or something like really specific and hands-off, more of like a passive income thing. But if you're actively engaged in it, normally what you'll see and what I've seen a lot and what I had for a while on my own side was just like, hey, you want to work together, fill out this form and I'll get right back to you. Here's what I recommend doing instead. I'm gonna show you how to do this inside of ConvertKit with a visual automation. I really do believe this is the best tool for clearly seeing how you can lay all of these steps out. You're gonna see exactly how I do it. There's gonna be a link to download these scripts in the description box below. You can also, like, click right here, or you should be able to, in order to access those scripts. So what I want you to think about is how can we demonstrate our expertise, show a case study of how other people have worked with us, and give a little bit more background detail on what the process is gonna be like like. Now you can still email and connect with them one-on-one to talk about the specific job, but I do want to show you like how you can show them how much of an expert you are and how much they should hire you. This is especially great if someone is just maybe kind of casually interested in working with you and you get to show off your expertise in that follow-up sequence. I'm also going to be showing you a couple of the integrations and some of the tagging methods that I use in order to make sure that people are organized. So, uh, let's go ahead and dive in directly to ConvertKit right now and see how this is done.
So here in ConvertKit is where you're going to see my initial funnel setup. And so I just put this together so that I could show you how I'm thinking about this and how you might want to structure a similar client services funnel inside of ConvertKit. The first thing that you're going to see is people come in through this form and where this form is on my website in a couple of places, but I'll show you where it is right here. So, I just have this post on how I create sketchnotes for clients. So again, it's really aligned with the type of content that I have on this post and in some places on my site. And I talk about this and I have another video here. And then this is where the form is. Want to add a new dimension to your work? Enter your email and we'll get started. So this is the top entry point right here. And I can click on this and I can make some edits if I want to, but I'm not gonna dive into that right now. It's really simple, really straightforward to do inside of ConvertKit, but This is the basis, this is the entry point right here, and it's a couple other places on the side, but it's still the same form. Now here's where the meat is, right inside of this sequence. So once they come in through this form, they're gonna get this sequence. And right now it's just 3 emails. I don't wanna do too much here because I don't wanna oversell it. A few emails, I'll probably add in one more that's like even more of a big pitch, but just this first one that's gonna go out immediately. And I'm gonna share in a doc where you can access these scripts and kind of make it work for your own, but this will give you a good overview. But basically I'm saying, hey, I'm really excited about the possibility of working together. For this one, I don't ask for a deposit or a sale right away. I've positioned the form as kind of interest. And so that's what I'm playing off of right here. Okay. So just saying, let me know what you have in mind. I'll get right back to you. The next one. Now I will say if that initial email goes well, then I'll just directly send them a payment form and they can pay me that way. That is still going to get tagged down here. Let's come back in here real quick. That's still going to be tagged with either Sketch Note Project or just SaaS Buyer right here. Sketch Notes as a Service. See what I did there? So if either of these are triggered, even outside of the particular sequence emails right here, they're still going to get pulled out. So if that doesn't go, then a couple of days later, a quick look at my process. And so I still have this video. I'm probably going to recreate this and give some more, give some different content. But I do have the first call action down here, which is to make it official with a deposit. So let's just click on this link and it's going to come up and say, if you're seeing this form, it's because we've talked about a project and how we can work together. So $500 deposit to get started. I'm going to, I'm going to play around with this amount, but that's just what I have it set for right now. The other thing, just to show you here, this is ConvertKit specific, but if you go in here, the way that I set this up is with a link trigger. So I just go in and select that they're interested in being a client. So when I click here, it's going to tag them as being, being interested. Okay, so MoonClerk client. I'm probably going to rename this actually and make sure that interest is in there. But that way I know these people are interested. Now again, if they go all the way through and they pay on MoonClerk, let me just show you this. But here's the deposit one that just showed you. So the integration, I can see right here when this deposit is met, it's going to tag the payers with Sketch Note Project. So that's what you see right over here, Client Sketch Note Project. So when this happens, it's going to pull them out of the pitch because you don't want to, you don't want to keep pitching people who have already given you money. That's kind of a pain. And this final one, this is the case study. This is the social proof. So I've got a few people that I've worked with here. A couple others that I've referenced up here, and a couple of testimonials. So this is where I do talk a little bit more, and again, I'm still gonna be tweaking this in a couple of different ways, but I say right down here, there are two ways that we can work together. First is through a project where we personally go over your message, what you want to communicate, the audience you are reaching. Projects start at $1,000 and require a $500 deposit to begin. Most can be completed within 2 weeks and include 1 round of revisions. So this is where, again, they can click on and they can go to this payment form to set a deposit. The other part right here. And the reason that I haven't brought this up yet is because this is like a secondary thing. Now it'll be interesting to see like how, how these two convert. But the second is because I do get a— I do get people and it's totally fine. If you work in the creative field, people are going to be like, what are you talking about? I'm not paying you $1,000 to do, you know, stick figures. But the second is if you already have a piece of content that you want to add sketchnotes to for clarity and impact, this can be a blog post, podcast, speech, and much more. These start at actually $50 and be completed in 3 business days. So they can click here and they may be like, oh, that's perfect. And that's where they get to choose a few different options. But that's the entire, that's the entire client process that we have right here. Just like, let me save this. That's the entire client interest funnel that I have set up. And this is how it looks inside of ConvertKit. So again, check out in the description below and a couple of the cards in the top right corner of the video where you can download the script that I have in this sequence.
All right everyone, thank you so much for watching this video about how I set up my sales funnel for service projects. I also highly encourage you to check out the video right here on the 4W and GRID method that I use to communicate with clients about expectations and how the work's going to be done. This is when I'm actually on a Skype call with them or just on the phone or even in person. This is the exact process that I go through and it's been incredibly useful, again, just for setting expectations and making sure everyone is on the same page. If you are just watching this for the first time, please go ahead and subscribe if you enjoyed this video and share it, give it a thumbs up, comment below questions that you have about sales funnels or setting things up in your email provider. Again, definitely recommend ConvertKit here. So looking forward to talking with you in the comments below. And yeah, you can also hit me up on Twitter @MattRagland. And I look forward to talking with you there. Hope you're having a great day. I'll see you next time.
