Scoping and selling automations
Nobody buys a zap
Clients do not wake up wanting a Make scenario. They wake up annoyed that leads go cold over the weekend, that invoices get sent late, that the same question gets answered forty times a week. The automation is plumbing; what they buy is the leak fixed. The VAs stuck at the bottom of this market sell "I can build zaps — $X/hr." The ones at the top sell "you're losing roughly $900 a month to slow lead follow-up; I can fix that for $250 a month."
Discovery: the questions that find the money
Before you propose anything, run a 20-minute discovery call. You're hunting for tasks that are frequent, rule-based, and painful — the lesson 2 filter, applied to their business.
"Walk me through what happens from the moment a new lead contacts you to the first reply they get. ... What tasks does your team do every single day that feel like copy-paste? ... Where do things fall through the cracks — what's the mistake that keeps happening? ... Which apps does the business run on day to day? ... If I could give you back one task forever, which one — and how many hours a week is it eating right now?"
Take notes in their words. "We keep forgetting to follow up" is a quote you'll reuse in the proposal — clients trust their own sentences more than your jargon.
The hours-saved math
This is the pricing engine. Get three numbers from discovery and multiply:
20 minutes × 60 leads = 20 hours a month. At $25/hr that's $500/mo of labor — before counting the leads that died from slow follow-up, which is usually the bigger number. Against a $500/mo problem, a $600-900 one-time build plus a modest monthly retainer is an easy yes, and you've anchored the conversation to their savings instead of your hours. A build that takes you six hours is not a six-hour invoice; it's a solution to a $6,000-a-year problem.
Watch a scoped pitch happen
Notice the anatomy: their pain in their words, the outcome in plain English (no "webhook," no "router"), the value math, then a price with a next step. Two Slack messages, zero jargon.
The maintenance retainer is not optional
Automations break — not because you built badly, but because the world moves: apps change their APIs, OAuth tokens expire, someone renames a form field, an edge case shows up in month three. A build with no retainer means you either work for free forever or abandon the client at the first breakage. Both destroy you.
Scope it in writing or bleed forever
Every engagement gets a one-page scope before you build: the workflows included (by name, with trigger and outcome), what counts as a fix (included) versus a new feature (quoted separately), response time for breakages, and the assumption that the client keeps paying for their own app subscriptions.
Do this now
Twenty minutes. Take the process you mapped in lesson 2 and turn it into money. In a doc titled Pitch — [process name], write: (1) the three numbers — minutes per instance, instances per month, what an hour costs the business — and the resulting monthly value; (2) a two-sentence outcome pitch in plain English, no tool names; (3) your price: one-time build + monthly retainer; (4) one line defining what's in scope.
Read the pitch out loud. If it sounds like a plumber explaining a fixed leak, it's right. If it sounds like a software tutorial, cut the jargon and try again. This doc is the template you'll reuse for every real prospect.
Tip: use your ← → arrow keys.