More Clients Memorandum

I wish I’d had more of this vital trait when I started out

Posted byIan Brodie on October 2nd, 2016.

I'm pretty sure I've said in a few earlier emails how much I admire people with courage.

And my experience has been that courage can be incredibly helpful in sales.

Now I don't mean the macho, full of bravado type “courage” you see lots of people in sales demonstrate. The kind of folks who don't take rejection to heart and can make 1,000 cold calls without inwardly dying like most people would.

I'm talking about a different sort of courage. But to my mind, more important.

The courage to admit to a client or prospect that you don't know the answer to their question right now.

The courage to tell a client when you think there's a better option for them than hiring you.

The courage to (respectfully) tell a potential client when you think they're wrong, or when you don't think they're being straight with you.

The courage to ask tricky questions that might have uncomfortable answers.

The courage to keep quiet and let the client do the talking.

The courage to pass control of the meeting over to the client or prospect and ask them what they'd like to do next.

This isn't macho courage. It's real courage. The kind of things most of us avoid doing. But the kind of things that lead to wonderful results.

I wish I'd had more of this when I started out :)

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You do too much

Posted byIan Brodie on September 28th, 2016.

You do too much – we all do.

We have too many projects on the go. So progress is glacial.

We have too many products and services. So we confuse our clients.

We do too many different marketing activities. So we never get good at any of them.

We spend too much time on what Cal Newport calls “shallow work”. Things that have benefit, but aren't in our top 5 biggest impact things we do.

Things like tweeting, discussions in Facebook groups, going to local networking events.

Things that have value, and for some people they're important.

But for most of us they sit at 10 or 13 or 17 in our list of important things to do. We do them because they're easy. We do them because they're a distraction from hard work that requires focus and concentration.

But every minute we spend on them is a minute not spent doing something more impactful.

I caught myself doing a bunch of low value tasks this week. So I've set a modest goal of identifying and stopping one activity that takes 30 minutes or more a week, but isn't in my top 5 or even top 15 most valuable things I do.

30 minutes a week doesn't sound like a lot, but it adds up to over 3 days a year.

I don't know about you but I could do with an extra 3 days a year :)

I'll update you on my progress next week. But more importantly, I'd like you to think about what you're doing that isn't adding much value and you can safely cut out.

It could make a big difference.

More Clients Memorandum

If they don’t learn, they don’t buy

Posted byIan Brodie on September 25th, 2016.

Last Sunday we bounced around the important idea that all sales come from conversations. With the obvious implication that you need to get more conversations with potential clients (rather than trying to automate or outsource everything).

But how do you handle those conversations?

Well, the accepted wisdom is that you need to ask questions. And I'm not going to disagree.

But in my experience, most people ask questions the wrong way.

I'm not talking here about open vs closed questions, problem questions, leading questions.

I'm talking about the purpose of the questions you ask.

Ask most people what the purpose of the questions they're asking in a meeting with a potential client is and you'll hear things like “to find out what they need”, “to find out if I can help them”, “to price qualify them”, “to build rapport”.

Notice anything in common with those questions?

They all benefit the seller, not the potential client.

Your potential client gets nothing from those questions: they're all about giving you useful information. They come out of it no better off than they went in.

Of course, you get useful information which helps you know what you might need to do to help them. but the process of questioning hasn't been all that great an experience for them, just a grilling.

And it hasn't set you apart from your competitors either. You asking a bunch of questions to find out what they need feels pretty much like everyone else asking questions to find out what they need.

Nothing wrong with asking these questions. But they're not enough if you want to stand out.

My advice is to also ask questions that really get your potential clients thinking. That help them see things in a new light. That trigger lightbulb moments where they have to stop and really think hard about something.

Questions that they benefit from. That they learn from.

Obviously there aren't any standard, canned questions that you can use that do this in all circumstances. 

But you can come up with these insightful questions if you do some preparation.

Think through the work you do with clients and make notes on the surprising things you find. Especially things that run counter to what accepted wisdom is in your sector.

If everyone says you should specialise, but your clients have been successful positioning as generalists, that could be the foundation of a good set of questions.

If everyone says “stories sell” but you've had success using facts and data, that can be the basis for good questions.

It's not easy to come up with insightful and insight-generating questions. If it was, everyone would be doing them.

But if you put your mind to it, you can identify questions to ask that will help your potential clients understand their situation better, not just tell you what they already know.

And if your potential clients come out of a meeting feeling smarter, it won't be long before they'll become paying clients.

More Clients Memorandum

Where do clients come from?

Posted byIan Brodie on September 18th, 2016.

Where do clients come from?

I'm talking here about higher end clients. People who hire you for consulting, coaching, training, legal advice, accountancy, etc. People who pay big money.

Every client I've ever had has come from a conversation.

I know that sounds trite. Of course we have to speak to people before they hire us. But if you look at a lot of marketing and the way people run their business you'll see that very often we're geared up to actually avoid conversations.

First thing you hear on the phone these days when you call a business for help is a message telling you that most of your questions can be dealt with on the web (yes, I know that, I tried and it didn't work, that's why I'm calling you). They don't want to speak to you really.

We all do it. We screen our calls. Get other people to speak to clients for us. We have meeting booking systems that mean we don't “waste time” talking to people to get a meeting scheduled with them. I know some people in professional businesses who even have their PAs send out their email newsletter for them so it's not even coming from the person themselves.

I'm a huge fan of automation as I'm sure you know. But if we think we can get big sales without speaking to people we're kidding ourselves.

Instead, we should use our automations to trigger conversations, not stop them. And we should use them to make sure we're speaking to the right people.

That's why I love simple things like asking new email subscribers what their biggest problem or challenge is (in areas I can help them with).

If someone has subscribed to my regular emails it's a safe bet that they're at least interested in the sort of problems I help people with, otherwise they wouldn't have subscribed.

And if they take the effort to write me an email telling me what their big problems are, it also tells me that those problems are pretty urgent for them and that I must have built up enough trust and credibility with them already for them to be willing to share that very personal information with me.

Are these people worth having a conversation with? For a service business, you bet they are.

Way, way more so than a conversation with someone I happened to have met at an event, or even someone who's been referred to me.

Clients come from conversations.

So make sure your marketing is getting you more of them with the right people, not fewer.

More Clients Memorandum

How to write so your audience will listen

Posted byIan Brodie on September 11th, 2016.

In any marketing it's vital that you're able to communicate with your audience in a way that gets them to actually listen to you.

Nobody listening, nobody paying attention = nobody buying.

Now I've written before about some of the key principles here:

• Make sure you understand your potential clients at as deep a level as possible: know their hopes, fears, aspirations, goals. What they like, what they hate.
• Try to write (or speak) conversationally. In the way a friend or trusted business colleague would communicate.
• Use stories and examples, make it real and concrete for them.

Of course, that's easier said than done. If I look back at some of my early blog posts and emails I cringe at how stiff and formal they sound. Even today over 8 years later I often lapse back into trying to sound clever.

If you're not used to writing it can be tough to find a voice that works well and really connects with your ideal clients. So here's a simple technique that might work for you: study things that you know work.

Just to clarify: I said “study” not “copy”.

What I mean is that you take a piece of marketing or writing that you believe works well with your audience and you study it to figure out why it worked. WHat was the headline? Who did it target? What got their curiosity? How did they keep that going to get your to read (or watch) further etc.

I'm not a big fan myself, but some people advocate hand-copying something in order to learn from it

What you're trying to do is embed the patterns and style in your brain so that eventually, you'll integrate those successful patterns in your own writing.

Not verbatim, of course. Not copying. But learning. Apparently the more you write out material that's worked, the more you pick up little subtleties from them. They infuse the way you yourself write in future.

It's important you do it by hand by the way. Recent research in cognitive-neuroscience, including a landmark study at Princeton and the University of California, has shown that we learn differently and better when we write things rather than type them.

For many decades, professional copywriters and a number of fiction writers too have developed their styles by copying out classic works in their field by hand to learn the style of the masters.

That doesn't mean they ended up becoming imitators. Hunter S Thompson for example, hardly a copycat, reportedly wrote out “The Great Gatsby” and “A Farewell To Arms” by hand in order to learn the styles of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

He had his own completely unique voice. But it was informed by study of those masters. Not just by reading them, but by copying out their exact words.

I haven't got the patience for that. But I definitely try to study what works. Not just listen to people telling me why it worked but figuring it out for myself from first principles.

It's a bit of a slog, but it's worth it.

More Clients Memorandum

Your business really IS different. Here’s how to figure out what will work

Posted byIan Brodie on September 4th, 2016.

Good marketing is based on timeless principles that apply across all businesses.

Deep understanding of your ideal clients, a clear and compelling value proposition, giving value in advance, nurturing relationships. Doesn't matter what your business is, these will all work for you.

But you also need to adapt your marketing to the specifics of your business: the clients you target and the products and services you sell.

In next Sunday's email I'll talk about adapting your “voice” to fit your clients. This week though I want to talk about a simple technique for adapting content marketing to fit your business.

There's an awful lot written and talked about the importance of content marketing. Some of it very good. Some of it just tosh.

The problem is that very many writers on content or online marketing only really know the marketing business. They've never worked for real bricks and mortar businesses, or even non-marketing online businesses.

As a result, they're blinkered. They see techniques that work for marketing businesses and they assume they work for all businesses.

For example, I recently read an article saying how the bar has been raised and we need to create even more content these days, and it needs to be longer and more in depth than ever.

Now I'm a big fan of encyclopaedic content. In many fields it gets shared and linked to more than any other type of content. That's certainly the case in the world of marketing.

But I'm skeptical that every business needs to post as frequently and do such in-depth content as a marketing business.

Here's something you can do in your business to see what will really work for you when it comes to content marketing: reverse engineer what is already working for others.

Don't just take the word of the marketing experts at face value. Check what's really succeeding in your marketplace.

When it comes to content marketing, what's the purpose of your content?

Partly it's to build credibility and trust with potential clients. But it's also to attract them in the first place by getting found in the search engines and getting shared on social media.

And you can measure that.

Think of some of the keywords you'd like to be found for and search for them on Google. Then study what appears in the top 10 results (look for normal sites from your competitors or similar businesses to yours rather than things from Wikipedia, the BBC or Forbes magazine).

Look at the specific articles that appear in the results. Are they really long articles or short ones? Video or text or audio? Specific or general? Full of images or plain text? Are the articles simple lists of tips, case studies, in-depth analyses, personal stories?

Go over to Buzzsumo.com and look at the articles that are the most shared on social media for those keywords too and do the same analysis.

Then look wider at the sites they're from. How often are they posting new material? Are they very niche or do they cover a broad range of related topics?

All this will give you clues as to what type of content is working in your field to get shared and to get ranked on Google.

Then use that to guide the type of content to produce yourself.

Because if your audience is rewarding that type of content by sharing it and Google is rewarding it by showing it high on the search results, there's a good chance that's the sort of content that will work well for your business.

No guarantees, but a good chance.

And a far better chance than if you blindly follow what the marketing experts tell you “always works”.

Quick case in point: I googled “teambuilding techniques” and looked at the word count of the top 5 articles for that topic. Far from needing to write huge 2,000+ word articles as content marketing gurus would have you believe, not one of the top 5 articles was over 1,600 words and the average word count was just 873.

Try it for some of your keywords. You'll find that very often what it takes to succeed in your business is quite different to what the experts assume.

More Clients Memorandum

This works better than any tips or techniques

Posted byIan Brodie on August 28th, 2016.

I'm a real sucker for great new tips, techniques, tools, shortcuts, “hacks” and other quick ways of getting better results from your marketing.

But the truth is that the big wins don't come from tips or tricks.

They come from getting the fundamentals right. Again and again.

Fundamentals like really understanding your ideal clients so your products and services are what they want (not just what you think they want).

Fundamentals like having something of value to offer potential clients before you ever meet or work with them, so you build credibility and trust quickly.

Fundamentals like follow-up and nurturing your relationships so you're top of mind when your potential clients are ready to buy.

Fundamentals like being able to  “sell” face to face, on the phone, or via a webinar or web page (and by “sell”, I mean help a potential client understand their problems, the potential solutions, and decide whether they'd be a good fit for working with you).

Master the fundamentals and the little tips and tricks will improve your results even further.

Get the fundamentals wrong and all the tips, tricks or clever techniques in the world won't hurt.