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Archive Archive for 2011

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More Clients Memorandum

Revealed: my top 3 performing emails

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 18th, 2011.

Being a bit geeky, one of the things I like to do is analyse data. And one analysis I often return to is effective email subject lines.

Now the ultimate measure of the performance of an email is how much new business I get as a result of my emails. But that can be tricky to track down to individual emails.

And in truth, the effect of the emails is culmulative rather than one email suddenly causing someone to pick up the phone and hire me or buy a product.

So what I often analyse is email open rates. What percentage of people who receive each email actually open it. So it's a measure of the performance of the email subject line rather than the email as a whole.

If I look at the emails you've been getting every Sunday from me there are some pretty interesting results that may help you when you're trying to write emails to get them opened by your potential clients.

Generally speaking, email open rates go down over time.

The first time I email someone after they sign up for my newsletter there's a high chance they'll open it and read it. Over time, people's interests and priorities change so the open rates go down.

What I looked for was email subject lines that “bucked the trend”. That got significantly higher opens that the email that preceded them.

Here are my three best performing subject lines using this criteria:

“5 crippling beliefs that keep consultants and coaches in the poor house”

“How to escape marketing overwhelm”

“Business Development romance in practice”

Why did they perform so well?

The first two are obvious, I think.

The first promises to reveal some information on “crippling beliefs” likely to “keep you in the poor house” if you hold them. The language is strong, and the benefit is clear: avoid these beliefs to avoid ending up poor.

The second promises to show you how to avoid a problem I believe a large number of professionals suffer from: being overwhelmed with their marketing. It's likely to hit a raw nerve with many people and again, the word “overwhelm” is a strong one.

The third one is a bit of a puzzle. It doesn't quite fit into the pattern of promising a strong benefit.

My belief is that the high open rate is driven by curiosity. People wondering what on earth “business development romance” actually is.

So three quite different types of subject line. One on avoiding potential pain people could be worried about. One on alleviating pain they could well be already feeling. And one arousing their curiosity.

When you come to write your own emails, see if you can work some of those themes into your subject lines.

And feel free to “steal” my subject lines too and tweak them for your own use. The “5 crippling beliefs” one was actually adapted from a headline on a Copyblogger blog post.

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More Clients Memorandum

Self promotion sucks!

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 11th, 2011.

I was talking to my friend David Seaman a while back (that's business coach and lecturer David Seaman, not goalkeeper David Seaman) about how difficult it is for most people to promote themselves.

He highlighted how most people have no problem promoting the business they work for or its products.

But when they start working for themselves and selling their services, they feel incredibly uncomfortable about promoting themselves.

A bit of a problem when your business's only product is you and what you do.

Perhaps it's the way most of us were brought up – not to boast or show off. And personally, I've never really got on with people who insist on telling the world how great they are – so it's not something I want to do myself.

So when you are your business, how can you promote it without the discomfort of self promotion?

The answer for me is to create “stuff” and promote that.

Or more accurately, to offer people the value in my “stuff”.

For example, the my 21 Word Email report or the 5 Day Authority Challenge I run.

While I may feel uncomfortable telling people about all the things I could do for them, my track record and my client successes – I have no problem telling them about what's in the report or the challenge and how it can help them.

By focusing on the thing rather than on me, it doesn't feel boastful.

But the end result is the same. If they work through the report or do the challenge, then it's highly likely they'll find it valuable and it will raise my credibility.

In fact, the end result is better. I've proven my expertise, rather than just claimed it.

This is something you can do too if you feel uncomfortable promoting yourself.

Create something that's of incredible value to your potential clients and that proves how good you are and promote that instead.

Much easier. Much more effective.

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Strategy

Build Trust and Credibility Before You Ever Meet People

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 9th, 2011.

I had a strange experience earlier this week.

A potential client dropped me an email and set up a time to talk. I followed my usual process and asked him to drop me a note with various details about his business and the key challenges he was facing.

When he called, the first thing he said was:

“It's funny, I've seen you so many times on video and heard you on webinars, it feels like I'm talking to an old friend”.

How great is that? We've never met or even spoken, yet the feeling he's getting as we start to speak is one of friendship.

Getting people to know, like and trust you has been a staple of business development for service businesses for as long as I care to remember.

The problem, of course, is that everyone does it.

In the competitive race, once the starter pistol goes, we all rush to build our credibility with potential clients and get them to like and trust us enough so that they're ready to buy. The one who inches over the finish line first wins.

But what if you began with a headstart? What if before the starter pistol fired, you were 50 yards down the track? Half way to your potential client knowing, liking and trusting you enough to hire you. So far ahead that your competitors will only have just got started by the time the client feels comfortable enough to buy from you.

That's the power of audio and visual media.

You can build credibility with the written word. But for that “know, like and trust” factor that we need if they're going to hire us for a complex and costly service – they need to see and hear us in action.

Podcasts, webinars, video on your website aren't going to get you all the way there – but they're going to give you a critical headstart vs your competitor.

If you use them, of course.

Do you?

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More Clients Memorandum

Do something different

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 4th, 2011.

I did some training a while back for a really good client. And something we did had quite a surprising result that I think we all can learn from.

The area we were focusing on was tenders/RFPs and we used a live example of a proposal they were about to work on to bring the training course to life.

The team did a great job and came up with a theme and approach to the proposal that really hit their customer's hot buttons while highlighting their strengths.

At the end of the course, one of the participants made an excellent point…

“You know, we normally would have just ‘gone through the motions' with that proposal and not come up with half the ideas we ended up including”.

It wasn't that we did anything particularly unusual.

We just analysed their customer's request a bit more deeply and used a couple of frameworks I'd developed for them to draw out what was really driving their needs, and what fears they might have about switching suppliers.

What was important was that we tried something different.

We looked at something they'd essentially looked at a hundred times before – but just with a different lens.

And it made a big difference.

Try it the next time you're working on your marketing.

Look at what you're working on through your customer's eyes. Or your competitors'.

Instead of focusing on problems, focus on aspirations – or vice versa.

Instead of your normal benefit-filled headlines – write copy to invoke curiosity or surprise this time.

Do something different. It can work as well for you as it did for me.

Speak soon,

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More Clients Memorandum

How to market like a professional poker player

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 28th, 2011.

About a decade or so ago I got a bit obsessed with poker.

For an ex-mathematician like me who then went on to study business and psychology, it's an alluring game. Full of analogies and parallels with business and marketing.

Although I haven't played for years, I still have a huge library of poker literature in storage. Brunson, Sklansky, Malmuth, Caro, Schoonmaker, dozens of them.

And I'm still sometimes reminded of the similarities between poker and business. Here's one that struck me recently.

Stacking the Odds in Your Favour

Perhaps the biggest difference between poker professionals and casual players – the thing that most results in one group winning money and the other losing it – is simply that the pros play less hands.

In the most popular form of poker, hold-em, there's a saying that “any two cards can win”. And while that may be true in exceptions, following that advice and regularly playing any two cards is a surefire route to the poor-house.

Instead, the pros stack the odds in their favour by only playing the best starting hands. They sit out round after round and only invest their precious chips in starting hands they know have a positive expected value (ie. if played often enough, they'll make money).

It's not a particularly clever strategy. It's not a particularly exciting one. But it works. It's the foundation they then build on.

Now, if you were to watch poker on TV it wouldn't seem that way. Every pro mixes up their game and plays cards you wouldn't expect so that they don't become predictable. And inevitably the TV shows focus on those unusual hands, or hands where a big bluff comes off or someone gets lucky on the river.

But underneath all the fireworks, and the table talk, the pros know the odds and they play them.

Similarly, in marketing, one thing that separates successful rainmakers from those who struggle is they stack the odds in their favour by focusing on prospects with a high chance of becoming clients.

It sounds obvious. But so few people do it.

They don't have a clear picture in their mind of exactly the sort of person likely to need their services.

They go to networking events filled with people unlikely to ever become a client or to refer one.

They advertise in general media or Yellow Pages.

Their website offers nothing of value or interest to the people who would make the best clients for them.

When they ask for referrals, they say they'd be happy to get a referral to “anyone” or “small businesses”. Such broad definitions that they don't get referred to anyone (or worse still they get referred to people never likely to buy from them and so waste their time).

If you want to be successful and productive with your marketing you must invest your time and effort like professional poker players invest their chips: only in the very highest potential areas.

For most of us, our time is a super-scarce resource. Yet so often we use marketing approaches that cause us to spend valuable face-to-face time with people who aren't perfect prospects for us.

The result is not only wasted time for us – it's also a painful experience for both sides.

Don't be like the poker amateurs who play any two cards and throw away their chips night after night.

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Selling

It Ain’t What You Do…It’s Who You Do It With

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 25th, 2011.

Wrong People Quite a bit of the training and coaching work I do is to help professionals improve their selling skills to close more business.

It's an area where many people feel unfomfortable – they don't want to be too pushy or “salesy”.

And there are indeed techniques and approaches which can improve your conversion rate by improving the way you interact with potential clients in sales meetings.

But often there's something else you can do. Something that can have an even bigger impact than any sales technique.

Let's do a little exercise.

Think about the very best ever sales meeting you’ve had. A meeting with a potential client that was incredibly pleasant, where you felt really engaged, and where the client emerged enthusiastic and signed up to work with you right away.

Visualise it now.

Now rather than thinking about what you did in that meeting, I want you to think about the characteristics of the client you were meeting with. What was it about them that made the meeting go so well?

Chances are, they had most of the following factors:

They had a genuine problem or issue that you could help with
The issue was important to them – it had a big impact
You could add a tremendous amount of value to them
They were able to easily afford your services
They respected your expertise – they saw you as an authority in your field
They trusted you – they weren’t second guessing what you were saying and your motives
You got on well – your personalities and communication styles clicked

Let’s call these types of people your high potential prospects.

Here’s one of the big secrets to having more successful sales meetings.

Your success at winning clients is less to do with what you do in your sales meetings and much more to do with having the meeting with the right person.

If you can sit down with a high potential prospect: someone who has a genuine need for what it is you do, who feels the urgency of that need, who trusts in you and believes in your capabilities – then you are very likely to get a sale.

Conversely, if you meet with people who don’t have an urgent need, or who don’t perceive you to be an expert at what you do – then no matter what clever sales techniques you might use, you’re going to struggle to sell. It’s going to be painful.

Now, if you're a huge company – IBM, say – then you don't have much choice. You pretty much need to sell to everyone to keep up your market share and revenues.

But for most of us, that's not the case. Most of us only need a handful of good clients every year to do very well indeed.

We have a choice. We don't have to try to sell to everyone.

One of the characteristics of a consultant or coach with an inadequate marketing system in place is that they have very few high quality leads, and spend a lot of painful time trying to sell to the few they do have. Most of whom aren't anywhere near the high potential prospects we thought about earlier.

With a strong marketing system, the people you're meeting are a good fit to that high potential prospect profile. They're a pleasure to meet with and talk to, and they're much, much easier to sell to.

So next time you lose a sale, or are considering doing something to improve your selling skills, take a step back.

Is the issue really your selling skills?

Think about your most recent sales meetings. Have the people across the other side of the table looked like those high potential prospects you visualised earlier?

If they haven't, then chances are the issue is really your marketing system.

Chances are you're just not selling to the right people.

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Strategy

Why your competitors will fail (and you won't)

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 19th, 2011.

This is a guest blog post by David Ackert of Ackert Advisory, founder of the Practice Boomers e-learning business development program for service professionals that helps them get more clients and grow their practice.

I've just joined the faculty over at Practice Boomers and will be contributing a number of articles and resources. Here's a short and sweet article and video from David on a (still) much underused marketing approach.

Whenever I speak to groups, I ask for a show of hands to this question: “How many of you regularly ask your clients or referral sources for business?”

Consistently, only 10-15% of the audience raises their hands.

The other 85% confess that they aren't very proactive when it comes to growing their practice. They wait for their clients to think of them, then they react and provide service, then they wait for the next email or telephone call.

When I ask them why, they ultimately give the same reason: They don't know exactly how to ask their clients and referral sources for business without offending them.

That’s understandable. No one wants to jeopardize their client relationships. If common sense keeps us among the ranks of the 85%, so be it. Better to play it safe until some better alternative presents itself; a simple, a clear technique that generates referrals without compromising our clients’ good will. Perhaps at some point in the future you’ll have such a technique.

Perhaps six minutes from now.

This short video shows you exactly what to say, how to say it appropriately, and who to say it to.

Put it to work and you'll enter the 15% who ask for the business they want without risking the clients they have.

* As a faculty member, if one day you join the Practice Boomers community I'll get a referral fee.

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Marketing

Are You Building Your Tribe Yet

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 18th, 2011.

I'm going to talk about a marketing strategy that's not for everyone.

It's hugely powerful, perhaps the most powerful strategy there is. But as I say, not for everyone.

The strategy is to build a tribe, a following, a “gang” – call it what you will.

Seth Godin wrote about it in his book Tribes (though to be honest, I think he overcomplicated it).

I touched on it when I wrote about Authority Marketing recently – establishing yourself as a leading expert in your field. Building a tribe goes one step further.

Building a tribe means creating a following of people who not only respect you, not only believe you know what you're talking about – but support you, want you to succeed.

Or more exactly, they want what you stand for to succeed.

You see, creating a tribe is about more than you. It's about a cause, a higher purpose.

To build a tribe you have to stand for something, champion something.

Back in the 80s my wife used to shop a lot at Body Shop. It wasn't just that they had great products. It was what they stood for.

Notwithstanding the later controversies about whether they were quite as green as they made out, at the time it felt good to support a company which stood for something we believed in.

Of course, the products had to be great too. But later, when the high street stores started bringing out comparable (and cheaper) “natural” brands we stayed loyal.

We felt we were part of a cause. And we were evangelists to those who hadn't “seen the light”. We identified with the people behind the business and what they were trying to do.

Can “normal” businesses like yours or mine inspire the same fierce loyalty and feelings of belonging?

Sure we can.

We all stand for something when you think about it. None of us is purely in it just for the money.

I interviewed consultant John Seddon recently for my Authority Marketing podcast series (you can listen here: John Seddon Interview). John's company is hugely successful and they win a lot of improvement projects with the public sector.

But they don't just win them because they're good at what they do. They win them because Seddon is an evangelist for systems thinking led improvement. He has a passion for improving the public sector ‘the right way” and is fiercly critical of the status quo. That's attracted a tribe of people who buy in to his philosophy.

My friend Charlie Green is the go-to guy for improving trust in business. But he hasn't just got there because he's an expert in trust. He's got there because he has a point of view on what businesses should be doing to build trust – on what's right and what's wrong.

Another friend, Tom Searcy, leads the field in advising companies on winning big sales through RFPs. But he's not a cold technician. He's a cheerleader and advocate for small businesses fighting against their bigger competitors to win those big sales.

Whose cause do you champion?

Perhaps you're a leadership trainer looking to unleash all the hidden talents in organisations. or a career coach who loves to help people find their calling. or a supply chain consultant on a mission to cut waste and bureacracy. Or a marketing consultant looking to generate growth in neglected inner cities.

For myself, over the years, I've seen myself becoming more and more an advocate of “pain free” ways of marketing and selling. Of approaches that allow professionals to win clients without being pushy or sleazy – and actually enjoying what they do. A champion of “pain free marketing” as it were.

What about you? Do you have such a passion?

Because if you actually stand for something, if you can build a tribe around that, then marketing becomes a whole lot easier and more pleasant.

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Marketing

Why Networking Doesn’t Work (for me)

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 18th, 2011.

Are you a good networker?

I was pretty good. Invested in training. Read all I could. Went to some great events organised by some wonderful people.

I put the work into it. Practised and practised. Even got good enough to be asked to teach networking skills to others.

But it frustrated the hell out of me.

Perhaps you've experienced something similar? I used to go to events, meet people, ask them about their business, probe some of their challenges, tell them about what I did if asked.

All the stuff you're supposed to do.

I did OK. But nowhere near as well as I thought I should be doing.

After a few years it finally dawned on me what was going on.

You see networking, like any marketing, is a game.

And it's a game of skill. The people who do best at networking are the ones with the best networking skills.

Now that might sound like stating the bleeding obvious, but bear with me.

By networking skills I mean how well you interact with others, how good a listener you are, how well you can get across what you do in an interesting and memorable way.

Of course, there's more to it than that. But critically, success at networking is not particularly dependent on the depth of your expertise. On being the best in your field.

Don't get me wrong – you have to be good at what you do. Eventually your reputation will catch up with you if you're not.

But you don't have to be the best.

What happens is that when you enter that room, you're on a level playing field.You could be the world's leading expert in your field, it doesn't matter. No one knows you.

By the time they leave the room, the impression they have of you will be based on 5 minutes of interacting with you.

Even if they meet you multiple times over multiple events, their impression of you will be based on a very small amount of time.

Enough time for them to tell if you're a nice person. To tell if you listen to them and engage with them. Enough time for your networking skills to shine.

But nowhere near enough time for your depth of expertise and experience to show. For them to tell if you're really the world's leading expert or just a decent hardworking professional who does a good job.

And that's when I realised why networking wasn't working for me.

At the risk of sounding immodest – I really am an expert (in the rather limited field of marketing and business development for consultants and coaches – I'm pretty much a duffer at everything else).

My networking skills are good. But no better than dozens of others who've done the training and put in the work like I did.

Put me in a room alongside an averagely skilled marketing consultant who's a master networker, and he'll come out with the business, not me.

That's the nature of networking.

Nothing wrong with that. But it told me that I needed to find marketing methods that played on my unique skills.

For me, doing presentations at events rather than just attending them gave me a chance to showcase my expertise – and it worked far better for me at building relationships and winning clients.

As, of course, does my website, webinars, articles, etc.

Nowadays I only do marketing that showcases my expertise and builds my percieved authority.

What can you learn from this?

Whatever your personal edge – whether you're a technical expert, someone with decades of experience, you're a wonderful person to work with, you always get results, you're the cheapest there is.

Whatever it is – you need to use a marketing approach that showcases it.

Don't use approaches where you're just one of many like I did for so long with networking.

Focus on something that will let you shine.

So what approaches worked better for me (and will probably work better for you too)?

They're the strategies I outline in detail in Momentum Club. You can grab a $1 trial and start implementing those strategies right now by clicking here.

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Get Clients Online

How to Win Business with your Blog – Part 9: The Best Resources For Blogging

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 17th, 2011.

Tools In my series of articles on How to Win Business with your Blog you'll have seen just how powerful a blog can be in winning you clients. And you've learned some of the key strategies to make blogging work for you.

But there's often a big gap between information, ideas, good intentions – and actual implementation.

Often it's tricky to know where to start, and you may be worried about running down a dead end or just wasting your time.

So here are my recommendations on key resources to help get you up and running quickly.

Getting Your Blog Up and Running

Firstly, I recommend that rather than hosting your blog on a free platform like blogger.com or wordpress.com, you host it on your own domain. It's not that tricky, and it means that the assets you build (for example, the links in to your site) are yours, rather than helping out the blogging platform. And you're not subject to the whims and policy changes of the platform providers.

To do this, you'll need to register a domain (or use one you already have – such as running it at www.mysite.com/blog) and then get hosting for the domain.

For domain registration I personally use godaddy.com as my primary registrar. They're easy to use with good customer support. And because they're big, no matter what you're trying to do (for example configure google apps) there'll be instructions on how to do it on godaddy.

My primary sites (including this one of course) are hosted on Lightningbase for high performance at great value. I can thoroughly recommend them. I also host other sites on Siteground which is a good, low cost alternative.

You can boost the performance of any site using a content delivery network. Cloudflare is a free one I use. It's a bit technical to set up but worth it.

Without question, the platform I'd recommend for your blog (and your website generally) is WordPress.

Sure, there are other free platforms like Drupal and Joomla. And other proprietary systems to run your blog.

But WordPress works. It's got by far the most available themes (to make your site look good) and plugins (to give it functionality like doing backups, adding social media icons, optimising the site for search engines, etc.). And almost everything is free.

It's well supported by website hosting companies, so you can install it and have it running with one press of a button.

And there's no shortage of people who can help you – either with advice, or to do the whole thing for you.

So head over to www.wordpress.org to check it out.

Themes and Plugins for WordPress

Your site needs to look professional – and the best basis for that it to tweak a WordPress premium theme.

On ianbrodie.com I use the Expert Marketer theme from Themeforest.

Studiopress is the home of some very high quality WordPress premium themes – many designed specifically as showcase sites for consultants and freelancers. My other favorites are the Executive Theme, Enterprise Theme, Agency Theme and Freelance Theme.

Optimizepress is the theme I use to run my membership sites. It's specially pre-configured to handle sales pages, “squeeze pages”, product launches and membership sites. Thoroughly recommended – this theme has saved my literally days of configuration.

For high converting landing pages on my own site where I don't want to send people to a different site, I use LeadPages. It's such a huge timesaver – you just select the basic template for optin forms or webinar registrations or sales pages, make a few adjustments to text and images and you've got a high converting page up and running in less than 5-10 minutes.

For optin forms on your normal blog pages and posts, I recommend Thrive leads. It has a “what you see is what you get” editor and templates that lets you create great looking optin forms for your sidebar, after blog posts etc.

If you've got a premium theme it probably has built in search engine optimisation features. But if not, you'll need the All in One SEO Plugin or Yoast's SEO plugin. I also recommend W3 Total Cache to boost the performance of your site. For all my sites I use Contact Form 7 as a way of creating quick, easy contact forms for people to get in touch with me.

I also use Tweetily to randomly tweet out links to my old blog posts.

For my social sharing icons I use the Social Warfare plugin – it's one of the few that properly counts Tweets these days.

For my podcasts I use the Blubrry Powerpress plugin. And I use Akismet to trap spam comments.

Most important of all: you need to take regular backups of your site in case of problems. There's a free database backup plugin for wordpress. This backs up your blog posts and pages. Many web hosting companies – especially the premium ones like Siteground – have a backup solution included in the hosting.

Landing Pages

For Landing pages I use Thrive Architect. Thrive Architect is very marketing focused with lots of options for optin forms, testimonials, etc. And it has some great “out of the box” templates you can reuse.

Email Marketing

I highlighted the importance of Email Marketing for nurturing relationships with potential clients.

Personally, I use Active Campaign. It provides advanced email marketing with excellent integration with CRM systems, accounting systems and a whole host of others. And unlike Infusionsoft or Ontraport it starts off at the same pricing level as simple systems like Aweber or Mailchimp.

You can read my review of Active Campaign here.

For more basic options if you don't need the advanced automation, I recommend GetResponse.

That's it – these tools and services should be really helpfully to you. But most important of all – just get going. You'll learn as you go along.

Tom Peters recently said “No single thing in the last 15 years has been as important to my professional life as blogging…and it's the best damn marketing tool I've ever had by an order of magnitude”.

'nuff said.

* Some of these links are affiliate links. In other words, if you eventually sign up and buy these products via my link I'll get a commission. This has in no way influenced my recommendation. I use all these products myself as my primary tools (as you can see from the site and my emails).

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