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The “secret” of being believable

Posted byIan Brodie on December 11th, 2016.

Last week I shared with you 5 ways of making your USP (or any of your marketing) believable and of being trusted.

They were very rational approaches. The use of guarantees, testimonials, demonstration.

But there's also a more emotional way to be trusted, if you're brave enough.

It's to be open.

Back in 1997, Professor Art Aron of Stony Brook University started a study which has been repeated in various forms many times.

He paired up students who didn't know each other and got them to ask questions to each other. One group asked relatively factual questions. The other started out factually but progressed to more personal, revealing questions, like “what are your most treasured memories?” and “how close and warm are your family?”.

At the end of the exercise, Aron got the pairs to report back on how close they felt to their partner.

Not surprisingly, the partnerships that asked each other the most revealing questions reported feeling much closer to each other.

And those feeling persisted. Weeks later, Aron's team observed that the partnerships who'd revealed more personal information in the study tended to sit next to each other in classes and actually “hang out” outside of classes.

In fact, when they were asked to rate how close they were to various people in their lives, they reported higher scores for the previous strangers they'd revealed personal information to than many people they'd known their whole lives.

Being open, sharing your feelings and personal information tends to make people feel closer to you and trust you more.

They've even observed similar things on dating websites. The people who share more personal details in their profiles tend to get more dates and to report those dates as being successful.

Now I'm not saying you should now fill all your blog posts and emails with personal stories about how sad you felt when you lost your cat when you were a child.

But I do think we could all be a bit braver when it comes to sharing how we really feel, how vulnerable we are.

There's such a huge temptation when we're trying to come across as experts, professionals and authorities that we pretend we have all the answers and we always know what to do.

That's certainly not the case for me. I'm often racked with indecision and worried that I might make a wrong move with my marketing that would make me look amateurish when I'm supposed to be an expert at this.

But I don't think that makes me less of an authority. I think it makes me human.

And humans connect with humans. We trust humans.

Could you be more open and vulnerable in your communication?

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No personality?

Posted byIan Brodie on December 8th, 2016.

Yesterday I said that personality was one way to differentiate your services from your competitors.

Sometimes, it's the only way.

But what if you don't have a “big” personality?

That's OK. Big personalities are great on stage, but I wouldn't want to work with one day-in, day-out.

What I mean by personality is more about being more open. Letting people see “the real you”. Admitting your flaws. Admitting your strange likes and dislikes. 

We're all wonderfully different. We click with some people and not with others. 

The problem is that most of us bury who we are beneath an air of professionalism. And that makes it difficult for potential clients to see enough of us to click. 

I mentioned James Altucher yesterday. He goes much further than most. He winds his advice in his emails into stories of his insecurities, failures, hang-ups, but ultimately successes.  

I care about James. I want him to succeed just as much as I want him to send me good advice. So much so that I actually got upset when I heard he'd split with his wife.

Most of us probably don't need to go as far as he does in sharing his personal experiences. But that personal angle is important. Think about the “water cooler” conversations you had at work or the chats about random nonsense in the office canteen. It was that chit-chat that helped you build relationships with colleagues.

Transfer that to your marketing.

No one wants to hear about your trivia every day, of course. But wrapping your valuable information in your personal experiences makes you more relatable. And it also makes your advice feel more concrete and “real world”.

A challenge for you: next time you write a blog post, article or email, or do a podcast or video: embed the tips you give in a personal story. See how it works out.

Better yet, tell me how it works out :)

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Differentiating is HARD. Here are 3 proven methods that work

Posted byIan Brodie on December 6th, 2016.

Standing out from the crowd is vital. But in the mature markets most of us operate in, it can be really, really difficult.

The challenge is that in our mature service markets, there are always others promising the same results as us.

I'm certainly not the only person promising to help you get more clients. And I'm sure you're not the only person in your market promising to improve their leadership, cut their costs, get them more website visitors or whatever it is you do.

Promising a core benefit is the price of entry in a mature market. You need to do more to stand out. 

One method is to focus on a sub-segment of your market.

That could be a particular niche you specialise in. Career coaching for returning-to-work moms. Sales training for enterprise software tools. 

Your specialisation gives potential clients confidence that what you offer will be tailored to their specific needs and so help them get better results. 

Or you could focus on a sub-segment that values a secondary benefit of your product or service. That's the classic Dominos Pizza “fast delivery” USP. Or for you, it could be sales training delivered multilingually, leadership coaching delivered discreetly without involving the rest of the organisation.

The second method is to highlight a unique method or system or “new ingredient” you use to deliver your service that others don't have. This is especially powerful in a sceptical market where clients may have used other suppliers and failed to get the results they were looking for. Your different approach gives them hope that they'll be able to get results with you.

Consultants have been offering cost reduction and productivity improving services since time immemorial. But when Michael Hammer & James Champy branded their approach to transformation as “Re-Engineering” and showed how it was different to previous improvement methodologies, it gave clients across the globe a reason to believe that this time, it just might work.

The final method might surprise you. It's personality.

But if you think about it (and if you're anything like me) you regularly buy from people who aren't really offering anything much different to their competitors. It's just that we like them. We click with them. We appreciate their style. We perhaps aspire to be a bit like them.

Face to face, “know, like and trust” has always been important. And it's usually built up over time and many personal interactions.

Online, there's less opportunity for those personal interactions and instead we often “fall in love” with those we follow who have big personalities.

I'm a subscriber to James Altucher's paid newsletter for example. I can't say I've ever done much with it, but I love the way he writes, his honesty and his creativity.

Ideally, you want to combine all 3. Have a unique approach for a specialised niche, delivered with your unique, attractive personality.

But even one is better than none!

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5 ways to get people to believe your USP

Posted byIan Brodie on December 4th, 2016.

In last Sunday's email I said that no matter how clever your Unique Selling Proposition is, it's not going to do you any good if no one believes it.

Here are 5 ways to establish that belief.

1. Repetition. If people hear something often enough they tend to believe it. This is the weakest form of “proof”, but it's the basis of most advertising. If we keep seeing on TV that Volkswagens are reliable or that Heinz soup tastes like you mother made it, we end up kind of believing it. Consistency is important: if you have a decent USP, keep communicating it. Don't flip flop between different messages.
2. Qualifications or experience. If your USP is about how you're more expert or better at something then having the qualifications or the documented experience in that area can help convince people that your claims of expertise are true.
3. A strong guarantee. If you back up your services and products with strong guarantees then people tend to believe the claims you make about them. Dominos, of course, did this to great effect with their guarantee you'd get a fresh hot pizza in 30 minutes or your money back.
4. Testimonials and social proof. I might be somewhat skeptical if you say you're good at something, but if others say you're good, I'm more likely to believe them.
5. Demonstration. This is the strongest form of proof. As the old saying goes, if you tell me you can fly I'll think you're mad. If others tell me you can fly I'll think they've gone crazy too. But flap your wings and zoom across the room and I'm a believer.
   As experts and advisors we can demonstrate our capabilities through our articles, videos, podcasts and other free stuff we give away. Tell someone you can cut their energy bills and they'll be skeptical. Give them a brilliant energy saving tip for free that saves them money and they'll believe you.

You can use one or all of these strategies for getting people to believe your USP. More is better, of course.

Which ones are you using? 

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How to get a bumper harvest of clients

Posted byIan Brodie on November 29th, 2016.

We've just had the first big frosts of the season here in the UK, which prompted me to head out to the greenhouse to harvest this year's crop of chillies.

Bear with me by the way, there's a client-winning tip buried in here eventually :)

Last year was pretty hopeless for me chilli-wise. I grew a bunch of ultra-hot varieties but got hardly any chillies fruiting. So I overwintered most of the plants in our conservatory.

When it came to putting them back out in spring disaster struck – all the leaves fell off the plants and I assumed I'd put them out too early and killed them.

But no. Within a few weeks, plenty of new growth had sprouted. The plants came back bigger and stronger and put on tons of fruit this year for our best harvest ever. Here's a picture of the first batch:

Yum!

You've probably guessed the point of the story already, but it bears repeating.

When it comes to winning clients, you can't expect all of your prospects to convert into paying clients quickly just because you want them to. There's a natural cycle for most people that involves just as much nurture and just as much time as growing plants.

If I'd treated my chilli plants like most people treat their prospects then when they didn't have a prolific harvest that first year I'd have given up on them and not bothered watering or feeding them. I'd probably have literally left them out in the cold.

But often your very best and most loyal clients are the ones who take their time. Someone who makes a snap decision to work with you may well make a snap decision to do something else. Someone who builds a strong relationship with you first and then commits is usually in it for the long haul.

How do you handle long-term nurturing of potential clients? It's easy when we've just met someone to send some follow-up emails, make a call, maybe post them something.

But what are you doing 3 months, 6 months, 9 months or a year later to keep that relationship growing?

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The missing link in most USPs

Posted byIan Brodie on November 27th, 2016.

Having a clear, simple statement of what your clients get from working with you and how you're different to your competitors is vital for any business.

But a statement isn't enough.

You might claim you're the best at something, but why on earth should people believe you?

Creating a USP is a starting point. But what really gets you clients is when people start to believe it.

And in my experience, the very best way to get people to believe your USP is to demonstrate it week-in, week-out.

My USP is that I give my clients simple, practical advice on marketing that really gets results.

How do I get people to believe this is what I can do?

I give them simple, practical advice on marketing that really gets results every week in my emails, blog posts and videos. For free.

By the time someone is thinking about hiring me, they know exactly what I do because they've seen me do it dozens upon dozens of times. 

Do you clients really believe your USP? Do you demonstrate it week-in, week-out?

If not, you should.

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A hidden source of clients you might be missing

Posted byIan Brodie on November 23rd, 2016.

In yesterday's email on the “marketing critical path” I mentioned a number of key activities that have a big impact on your ability to win new clients.

Here's something we often overlook though: retaining or extending our work with our existing ones.

Getting more business with existing clients (or retaining them when they might have gone elsewhere) is every bit as valuable as getting new clients, but an awful lot easier.

Don't get me wrong: you need to have a steady flow of new leads and clients. You can't just keep doing more with your existing client base. 

But my experience has been that most of us are very focused on that new client side already and rather less focused on doing more with our existing clients.  

A little while back I created a little “retention checklist” for my Momentum Club membership program to help me make sure I was doing everything I could to help my members get the most from my program and so stay as members for as long as possible.

I've extracted some of the more generally applicable ideas here to help you think through what more you could be doing to retain and strengthen relationships with your clients:

1. Make a brilliant personal first impression – e.g. a personal welcome letter/video/tweet/phone call/gift.
2. Get new clients getting results fast – e.g. a quick win review, extra training material, diagnostic to highlight areas for fast results.
3. Deliver extra value at “drop off points” – identify the points that clients typically leave or don't renew and make sure you're delivering extra value at those points.
4. Make your content/training/communications easily consumable – e.g. checklists, templates, do things in bite-sized chunks.
5. Engage pro-actively – watch for drop off in communication and interaction and reach out personally to re-engage.
6. Provide additional value they'd miss if they left – e.g. extra client-only webinars and content, personal critiques and feedback, tools & templates, discounts on your other products and services, “grandfathered” pricing.
7. Create community – have a private forum/group for clients, encourage sharing, discussion, helping each other, arrange live meetups.
8. Inspire with success stories – e.g. interview clients and promote their successes, encourage testimonials.
9. Make renewing easy – e.g. auto renewals via direct debit, credit card.
10. Find out why people leave – e.g. do an “exit” survey or interview and fix the problems people report.

Implementing just one of these could have a big impact on your client retention.

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What’s your REAL marketing critical path?

Posted byIan Brodie on November 22nd, 2016.

In project management, they have a principle called the “critical path”. It's the set of key steps on the plan that if any of them were delayed, would delay the whole project.

Other activities can get behind schedule and the overall project won't be late, but any problems with the steps on the critical path and you're going to miss your deadlines. Conversely, speeding up the tasks that aren't on the critical path doesn't speed up the project – you need to save time on the critical path to have an overall impact.

There's an analogy in marketing too. Not a perfect one, but a helpful one.

There are some activities you do in marketing that have a big impact on the number of clients you win. And there are others that don't.

If you want more clients, you have to do more of the “critical path” activities or do them better. Doing more of the non-critical activities has very little impact.

Unfortunately, most of us treat all activities the same. Partly because we just keep doing what we've always done. Partly because some activities are easy to do on a regular basis (you go to that monthly networking meeting that never leads to any clients because you don't have to think about it and it's a pleasant event).

And partly, it's because we haven't really analysed which of our activities has the most impact. 

If you get out a piece of paper and look at where your last clients came from you'll undoubtedly see patterns.

It's relatively easy if you do most of your business online like me – you can track the sources of traffic and what people do before they become clients.

If your clients come primarily offline, make sure to ask them how they first heard of you if you don't know that already.

For me, the vast majority of Momentum Club members either join after watching my “How To Get More Leads and Clients” webinar or they join after being subscribers for a while and eventually the time is right and one of my regular emails triggers a purchase.

Where do most of your clients come from? If you don't know, you really need to. Understanding your marketing critical path is critical to make sure you're spending your time on the right activities instead of wasting time on things that just don't get results.

Tomorrow I'm going to talk about a “hidden” source of clients most of us overlook that for most people is the very best place to focus your time.

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How I’m productive with email

Posted byIan Brodie on November 20th, 2016.

Last Sunday I mentioned how damaging to your productivity and creativity it can be to get distracted by stuff like social media and email.

Email is particularly challenging for many of us as it's how we conduct a lot of business. 

I get questions from customers via email. Notfications from my websites and membership systems. Offers and discussions from business partners.

So I have to use email. It's not something I can avoid to be productive in my job. It's a core part of the job itself.

Now most of the advice I've heard on email productivity is to ration your use of it. Process your emails once in the morning and once in the afternoon, for example.

In fact these days I sometimes get “out of office” email messages from people I've emailed that basically says “in order to be productive I only process my emails once a day – I'll get back to you later”.

The problem is, that's not very responsive.

If I have a customer who can't log in to access their online training course, or a client who wants advice on an upcoming key meeting they're going to it's no good me getting back to them days later when it's convenient for me.

Part of the reason I've built up a decent following is because I'm very responsive rather than aloof and distant. You might do something similar yourself.

So for me I try to read my emails every hour to give me that responsiveness.

But if I'm going to do that I have to be productive at it. So I use a simple system that might work for you too.

Basically I try to process everything just once. One of the big email productivity killers is re-reading the same email multiple times because you read it once and didn't deal with it.

So I go though the emails in my inbox via a quick scan and either:

1. Decide I don't need to do anything with them – they were for information only.

2. Decide I need to take immediate action. So if it's something I can do quickly I'll hit reply or pick up the phone or do whatever action needs to be taken.

3. Decide I need to take action later. if it's something I can't do immediately or will take more than 5 minutes I log the email in my to-do system. I use “Things” on my Mac and by pressing Ctrl-Space it creates a to do list item based on the email with a link back to it so I can always find it when I do the task.

After I've run through all my emails like that I archive the lot to clear out my inbox.

So next time I log into email I only see the new ones. I don't waste time re-reading old ones. I don't lose any things I need to do because I either did them already in step 2, or I tagged them in my to do system in step 3.

And if I made a mistake and need to go back to any of them, they're not deleted – theyre just archived out of my main inbox.

Simple really. And easy to do.

But processing like this means I can be very responsive to emails in 5 minutes every hour.

Of course, if I'm busy I won't check email that hour.

But doing it this way means I can be productive, and I can offer a really responsive service to my customers and subscribers.

Hopefully that might inspire you to create a similar system for yourself.