On Saturday June 1 2019 we held an open webinar on pitching services for ELT freelancers, entitled ‘Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf’. Why this title? Well, it referred to the fear that selling to clients often instils in our freelancing community. But fear no more!

The webinar was led by SLB socio and associate director of York Associates, Dale Coulter. Dale has lots of experience in English teaching, materials design, skills training and sales, so he was the perfect choice for this webinar.

Pitching services for ELT freelancers

Dale talked us through some of the key difficulties encountered while pitching services for ELT freelancers, including:

  • How to start the initial conversation
  • Identifying client needs
  • Getting to the ‘no’ as soon as possible (avoid wasting time)
  • Developing a timetabled strategy for pursuing suspects

“One of the more classical approaches to sales is to ask questions to reveal customer needs. Quite often, the people I speak to, they’re not actually aware of what they really, really, need … But in trying to uncover this, we might find it more difficult, or that the customer becomes frustrated about all of this questioning. So I’ll propose a different way of handling this conversation.”

Dale Coulter, SLB & York Associates

We had an excellent group of participants who got involved via the chat function in the webinar. Below we present the video of the event, from which we’ve edited out the pauses in which participants were on task. To follow the highlights of the chat box, to which Dale refers during the webinar, please download the PDF here.

Please feel free to continue the conversation via the comments section below. We look forward to hearing your views!

[arve url=”https://vimeo.com/341823911″ /]

You can follow Dale on Twitter via @dalecoulter and don’t forget our Twitter account too, @SLBCoop. Meanwhile, for more information on joining our co-op and getting access to excellent training like this on a monthly basis, as well as many other benefits, please visit https://www.slb.coop/g et-involved/ or ask us a question using our contact form.

About the author : Neil McMillan

Current president of SLB and a freelance teacher, writer and teacher educator. Course director on the SLB TBLT course. Author and collaborating professor at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

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