More Clients Memorandum

What to do with your good ideas

Posted byIan Brodie on December 15th, 2019.

In the last couple of weeks I've shared my thoughts on coming up with valuable ideas that your clients will find helpful and interesting.

So what do you do with them next?

I'm going to suggest not publishing them yet.

Instead, share them with a select group of potential clients.

Depending on the sort of business you're in, that might be grabbing a coffee or a phone call with half a dozen clients, ex-clients and potential clients.

Something like “I've been working on some new ideas for ways of improving your [whatever benefit they get]. It would be great to get your feedback on whether they make sense from your experience”.

Or you might share an outline of the ideas in your Facebook group or via email to a bigger group of people.

Either way, you're genuinely looking to get feedback.

But it's also a great way of getting your new ideas in front of potential clients without it feeling like you're trying to sell to them.

Instead, it feels to them more like they're getting exclusive, early access to something that might help their business.

I had a client message me after she did this with a new point of view we'd been working on. She simply bounced her ideas of a small number of potential clients and without her asking or pushing for it at all, a number of them signed up to work with her in that area.

(Nice for her, and nice for me as it more than paid for the cost of working with me within the first few weeks of us starting together :) )

But even if it doesn't turn into new clients immediately, it will strengthen your relationship with them and it will get you good feedback to improve your ideas before turning them into an article, a video or a new service offer.

That's the funny thing. We think it'll be better to impress clients by showing them something that's perfect and polished. So we lock ourselves away for ages (and sometimes never manage to get it finished).

But actually, we get better results by being more open and transparent with potential clients. Showing them our work in progress and getting their feedback.

And it's much easier to do things that way too :) 

More Clients Memorandum

It’s not so daunting when you think of it this way

Posted byIan Brodie on December 8th, 2019.

I'm continuing on our theme from last week of coming up with valuable ideas.

Because at the end of the day, if you want to be seen as an authority and leading expert by your clients you need to have knowledge and insights they can't get from anywhere else.

Now at first flush, that sounds quite daunting, doesn't it?

Having knowledge and insights your clients can't get from anywhere else sounds like something you'd have to be a professor or partner in a major firm to get. Or to be hit by a sudden flash of inspiration.

But that's far from the case.

Because often, new knowledge and insights for your clients comes from simply transferring knowledge over from other fields or other types of client.

For example, in my very early days (before I focused on marketing) I made a bit of a name for myself in R&D by importing a bunch of workflow and just-in-time techniques I'd learned in a short spell in manufacturing.

Those techniques were nothing new to operations veterans. But to the guys and girls in R&D who lived in their own silo, they were close to revolutionary.

And often, new knowledge and insights for your clients comes from glueing together different pieces of the puzzle from a variety of sources. And sometimes those pieces come from outside your field or even the world of work.

Or sometimes it just comes from hard work. Doing the research. Asking questions. Interviewing people. Doing surveys. Speaking to other experts and bouncing ideas around.

Sometimes it sneaks up on you. You accumulate experience working in your field and solving client problems and you end up taking for granted the things you know that are actually new and insightful to clients.

Or as I said last week, you just get your thoughts out of your head and onto paper and start sketching out models and thoughts.    

When you think of it that way and look at all the different ways you can come up with new ideas and insights that will position you as an authority, it doesn't seem anywhere near as daunting as being struck by inspiration.

But the key is you've got to do the work. Do the research. Spend quiet time bringing your ideas together. Think hard about your client problems and other things you've seen that might be relevant.

More Clients Memorandum

Thinking on Paper

Posted byIan Brodie on December 1st, 2019.

I'm going to take a break from hassling you about following up to talk about something I think is probably second only to follow-up in terms of its importance to your success at marketing.

It's coming up with valuable ideas.

They don't all have to be completely new, just different to what your clients are already doing.

And the best way to think of new ideas or to clarify and improve the quality of your existing ideas is to write them down.

Publish them.

Doesn't matter whether it's writing, audio, video.

Publishing is the best way of creating new ideas.

Years ago the chief editor at Gemini Consulting Sid Seamans introduced me to a book called “Thinking on Paper” by Howard and Barton, two researchers at Harvard.

The concept behind the book is something I've found to be 100% true time and time again.

The book talks about how our common conception of writing is all wrong.

We tend to think of writing as taking the ideas in our head and getting them out on paper.

But actually, the ideas in our head are only half-formed at best.

Our working memory simply isn't big enough to hold the entirety and subtlety of complex concepts.

So we think we have a good idea, but in truth, we just have the germ of one.

It's only by writing down our idea that we're able to fully examine and explore it in all its glory.

When we see it in writing we spot the flaws. We see what needs to be improved. What can be dropped and what can be enhanced. What's the core of the idea and what's the fluff around it.

In other words, at least half our thinking is done during or after we write down the idea. Hence “Thinking on Paper”.

And, of course, once we publish something, others can review it, criticise, give feedback, build on it.

The idea becomes so much more powerful than the little germ we held in our head

The trouble is most of us don't publish.

We keep our ideas in our head.

Perhaps afraid we'll be giving away our secrets. Perhaps afraid they won't be received well. Perhaps a bit lazy, or perhaps just not realising the value of writing our ideas down.

So instead we use the ideas raw with clients.

And frankly, we're short-changing them.

We're giving them 20% of what they could get if we wrote our ideas down, worked them, got feedback, improved them.

Let alone the marketing value we could get from making our ideas visible. 

So in addition to establishing the habit of follow-up, I'd urge you to establish the habit of publishing your ideas.

Be a little bit brave.

The rewards are worth it.

More Clients Memorandum

Here’s how to make follow-up easier

Posted byIan Brodie on November 24th, 2019.

Last week I talked about how important it is to establish a regular follow-up habit.

Easy for me to say you might be thinking.

Not so easy to do.

And that's true. Good habits are hard to establish, especially when they take effort and initially involve you going outside your comfort zone a little bit.

So I'm going to repeat a tip I gave you a few months ago. One that's worked brilliantly to help me establish good marketing habits and stick to them.

It's to use “habit stacking”.

There's a good article on habit stacking by James Clear here. It's an excerpt from his book Atomic Habits all about how to adopt better, healthier habits in life.  

In short, habit stacking is a technique where you make it easier to adopt a new habit by attaching it to an existing one you already do.

I used it to “force myself” to get into the habit of wearing a heated eye mask to help with a little eye problem I had a while back by attaching that new habit to my existing habit of having a freshly brewed coffee first thing in the morning.

And when it comes to follow-up, I stacked the habit of following up with my top contacts every Monday morning onto my existing habit of going out to a coffee shop to do my weekly planning.

(There appears to be a coffee theme emerging habitwise which I wasn't aware of…but let's let that slide for now).

I pretty much never miss my walk out to the coffee shop. So all I needed to do was add 20-30 minutes of follow-up after I'd done my weekly planning.

It was a good fit too as my planning activities sometimes highlighted things I could pick up on in my follow-up.

Now you don't necessarily have to do your follow-up on a Monday morning, or after doing some planning, or after a coffee (although it's a pretty good starting point).

But what you should do is anchor the new habit you want to do to an existing related one that you're good at sticking to.

And that makes it a lot, lot easier.

More Clients Memorandum

My secret weapon for follow-up

Posted byIan Brodie on November 17th, 2019.

An admission: I'm awful at following up with ex-clients or potential clients.

I get busy. I'm shy. There's always something else to do that doesn't involve human contact.

I'm an expert at knowing how important follow-up is and how to do it. I'm not so good at actually doing it.

At least not naturally.

The one thing I've found that saves me is systems.

Not necessarily IT systems. Just regular habits.

I may be bad at remembering to follow up. But I can manage to stick to my system of doing my planning every Monday morning.

And I can stick to my system of reviewing my list of the people I want to keep in touch with every month and thinking of ways I could follow-up with them this week.

And if I then put time in my schedule to do the follow-up, it usually gets done.

Systems are my secret weapon that overcome my own uselessness at this stuff.

Armed with a system I can do better, more consistent follow-up than a natural without a system.

That's good enough for me. And it's good enough to get great results.

If you're not a natural at follow-up (or even if you are) it's worth implementing a simple system like this yourself.

They're easy to stick to and they work.

More Clients Memorandum

Your true priorities revealed

Posted byIan Brodie on November 10th, 2019.

Your true priorities are revealed by where you spend your time.

That might sound a little unfair.

Like me, you probably look back on your week sometimes and wonder how on earth you managed to spend your time where you did. Or thinking about all the little emergencies that diverted you from what you really wanted to do.

But over time, it nets out.

You spend the most time on the things that are the most important to you.

Try this little exercise:

Over the last couple of weeks, what percentage of your marketing time have you spent:

[a] Marketing to generate brand new leads.

[b] Marketing to strengthen your relationship with existing contacts who haven't bought yet (but who could).

[c] Marketing to your existing and ex-clients. Not just doing your normal delivery work with them. Actually marketing to identify new opportunities and strengthen your relationship in those areas.

If you're like most people it's probably somewhere near an 80:15:5 ratio.

Generating new leads is the glamorous bit of marketing.

It's the stuff all the gurus talk about. It's the stuff than seems exciting because “if only I had a flood of new leads it would all be easy…”.

It's where people only just starting or who don't have a real business yet need to focus.

Building credibility and trust with your existing contacts isn't quite so exciting. Nor is extending your relationships with your existing and ex-clients.

But it's where the money is. It's what real businesses focus on.

It should be what you prioritise.

Of course, you still need to generate new leads, otherwise eventually your pool of contacts to nurture dries up.

But practically all of us would do a lot better if we put more focus on existing contacts and clients.

More Clients Memorandum

Conjuring up true believers

Posted byIan Brodie on November 3rd, 2019.

So last week we talked about how your best clients are committed clients: the ones who really believe in you and your approach for doing things.

They're the ones who'll keep coming back for more, and who'll stick through temporary ups and downs and roadblocks.

And I promised that this week we'd talk about how to turn potential clients into true believers.

My experience of it anyway.

So the first thing is that you need to start with people who are predisposed to your way of thinking.

What I mean is that if you're a leadership trainer who teaches people how to be better leaders in a kind of democratic, listen-to-the-team sort of way then it's best to start with potential clients who like and believe in that kind of approach. Best not to start with people who believe in individualistic or charismatic leadership.

I know that sounds kind of obvious, but it has implications that go back to what we talked about last week.

If your marketing follows the traditional path of focusing exclusively on the end results you help people get (improved leadership, more sales etc.) and not how you help them get those results, then you'll attract a broad church of people.

Some will be predisposed to liking your particular approach. Others won't.

So in the long run, it really does pay to be clear in your marketing exactly who your stuff is for and who it's not for. And to be open about the principles behind how you do what you do.

And if you teach those principles as part of your marketing, so much the better.

The people who buy in will stay and feel they're getting tons of value. The people who don't buy in will leave.

But just starting with predisposed people isn't enough. You have to strengthen their beliefs and direct them towards your particular approach.

In other words, it's not enough that they believe that democratic leadership is best. They have to believe that your particular brand of democratic leadership is the best of the best.

(Or whatever it is you do, of course).  

That means you need to give your approach a name. Something they can grab on to and talk about. Like Value-Based Marketing for example. Or the Growth-Share Matrix, or Principle Centred Leadership.

And you need to show them why your particular approach is the very best way to get the results they want in the way they want to get them.

So with Value-Based Marketing, I show how giving value in advance gets the attention of your ideal clients (who normally filter out marketing messages) and builds the credibility and trust needed for someone to be ready to buy.

And that means you don't have to be pushy and aggressive – something few of my folks want.

Your approach has got to “make sense” to your audience. There has to be a clear chain of logic they can see where if they do A, B will happen. If B happens, C will happen. And if C happens, they'll get the end result they're looking for.

There can't be any fuzziness. It can't be a generic “do this because it's good”.

It needs to be crystal clear how following your particular approach leads inevitably to the results they're looking for in a way they couldn't get doing it any other way.

Now I know that sounds like a tough ask.

But if you think about it, surely the reason why you have an approach you use with clients is because you believe it's the best?

So really, it's just a matter of surfacing the reasons why you do things the way you do and making them clear to potential clients.

Illustrating them with examples. Opening up the black box to show how they work.

Perhaps even backing them up with studies and research that shows how and why they work.

A bit of work. But worth it.

Because that real belief leads to committed clients.

More Clients Memorandum

Attracting Committed Clients

Posted byIan Brodie on October 27th, 2019.

For most people it's tough enough to attract any clients at all. So apologies if it feels like I'm setting the bar high when I talk about attracting committed clients.

But really, that's who you want.

Committed clients get results and come back for more.

And they're easier to work with. And less likely to stop a project mid-way through. That's especially important given the inevitable challenges and setbacks you get in any significant project.

You want your clients to be in it for the long term and not easily deterred by short term roadblocks.

How do you get those clients?

I think it's about appealing to more than just their desire for an end result.

I think they need to believe in you and your approach too.

The best clients kind of fall in love with you. And so they stick with you if things get a bit hairy.

The clients who hire you just because you're the first or the cheapest person to promise them the results they want tend to give up when the going gets tough. They're off and focused on the next opportunity or the next person to promise them the world.

In marketing, we often say that clients don't care about your process and how you do things. only the end result they get.

But I think that's only partially true.

Try telling a keto true believer that your balanced diet program is the one for them and see what happens. It doesn't matter how big the improvements you promise, if they're not delivered the way they believe is the right way, they won't be interested.

So part of your marketing should be about “converting” your potential clients into being true believers in your approach.

That's one of the reasons why I teach a lot in my marketing and give away a lot of free information.

If, through that teaching, I can convince you that something like Value-Based Marketing is the absolute best way for consultants and coaches to get more clients then you'll be much less likely to be seduced by quick fixes and all the other opportunities that get pushed at you every day.

No matter what untold riches they promise you, if you're bought-in to a certain way of doing things then you'll ignore them if they don't follow that approach.

And if we do work together to implement that approach you'll be more likely to stick with it through ups and downs because you believe in it.

Next week we'll talk a little more about how to turn potential clients into “true believers”.

But for now – think about what it is you believe in that you think your clients should too.

More Clients Memorandum

Don’t copy this

Posted byIan Brodie on October 13th, 2019.

You probably see a lot of marketing from your competitors. Especially if you're active online.

Linkedin posts, Facebook Ads, sometimes even Google Ads.

And you might have noticed that quite a lot of it seems to involve rather a lot of hype.

In my case, I see competitors saying that if you buy their stuff you can skyrocket your business within weeks, get floods of new clients, grow revenue by some astronomical (but always strangely odd-numbered and pinpoint accurate) percentage.

And I look at what I know about them and their products and I think “My products are better than theirs – should I be making big outrageous claims too?”

You might be thinking the same thing too about copying the hypey marketing styles that are so prevalent.

I'd avoid it.

My experience is that hypey marketing works: but it attracts the wrong sort of person.

My ideal clients are experienced business people. They may need some help with marketing or sales, but they're not new to business and they've been around the block a bit in life.

That means they're naturally a little bit skeptical and a bit worldly-wise. If they read some exaggerated claim with skimpy proof, it's going to turn them off rather than excite them.

The type of people who respond to hypey marketing tend to be a bit more gullible. Or a bit more desperate. Neither make great clients in my experience.

I'm guessing your ideal clients are probably more like mine than the ones attracted by hypey marketing. 

They respond much better to being treated with respect.

As David Ogilvy famously said, “The customer is not a moron. She's your wife.”

Smart clients see through hype.

So when we're looking at those outrageous claims and thinking “how can I compete with that?”, remember that real clients don't believe them. Real clients – by and large – are turned off by hype.

So let's keep things real. Let's proudly tell clients what they'll get from working with us – but without hype and exaggeration.

For the best clients, it works.

More Clients Memorandum

Don’t be a greedy guest

Posted byIan Brodie on October 6th, 2019.

I got my first proper sales training as a consultant back in 1995 when I had been with Gemini Consulting for about a year.

Back then Gemini was growing at a phenomenal rate and one of the reasons was that we took sales seriously and taught selling skills to our consultants very early on in their career. Even those, like me, who were far from natural salespeople :)

I remember very clearly we had one of our most successful VPs come in to talk to us about his experiences selling and one of the things he said that really stood out was “don't be like the greedy guest at a wedding that cleans out the buffet just because he can”.

What he meant was that the skills we were learning were powerful, and because the majority of our competitors were very traditional in their approaches we had a big edge. It would easily have been possible for our more skilled practitioners to convince clients to spend almost all their budget with us on huge projects.

But as the VP said, “it's much better in the long term to get invited back to the next wedding and the next”.

I sometimes think we need to remind ourselves of that with online marketing in particular. There's so much emphasis on “optimising funnels”, creating upsells and split testing alternatives to maximise sales that we sometimes forget that our best bet long term is to do a brilliant job for our clients so they keep coming back.

Rather than spending our time figuring out how to squeeze every last penny out of that initial transaction, we're better off thinking about how to create a brilliant first impression post-sale and deliver great results as fast as possible.

That'll get us invited back to the buffet time and time again.