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You need this to be believable

Posted byIan Brodie on November 1st, 2015.

Most of the time we interact with clients we need to be believable.

That could be in our marketing, when we're talking to them about working together or when they're paying clients we're recommending a course of action to.

If clients don't believe in us, it usually won't be long before they're ex-clients.

And if they don't believe in us when we're talking about working together, then the chances are we never will.

Now there are lots of things you need in place to be believable. But one of the big ones that is often missed is simply that you have to believe in yourself.

I don't mean the rah-rah “believe in yourself” motivational stuff.

I mean that if you're offering to do something for a client you must be confident you'll be able to do a great job.

If you're not, the client will pick up on it. It'll “shine” through subconsciously in your body language, word choice, the tone of your voice.

If you're trying to promote a service and you realise in your heart of hearts that you don't fully believe you can do a great job then you have two choices.

The first is to convince yourself.

I don't mean kid yourself. I mean go out and get feedback from people you've done this service for before. There's a good chance you'll get great feedback that will help build your belief.

And if you don't get great feedback, that's a sign you should shift to choice 2.

The second choice is to back off. You might want to sell this service. it might be a very prestigous thing to do and it might make you a lot of money.

But if you're not super confident you can do a great job you should scale back and focus on something you are confident you can do a great job with.

Eithically it's the right thing to to. And marketing-wise it is too as your potential client will pick up on your lack of belief almost every time.

So scale back to something you can do really well and work on building the capabilities to do the thing you want to do really well too.

You might need to do it a few times pro-bono or do it as an extension for an existing client. But either way you need to build up your own belief that you can do this brilliantly.

Only then will you be able to transmit that confidence over to your potential client so they'll feel comfortable hiring you. 

More Clients Memorandum

Break out of this habit to get closer to clients

Posted byIan Brodie on October 25th, 2015.

There's a nasty little habit it's very easy to get into that can really damage your ability to make a connection with your clients.

It was brought home to me at a conference I was at recently. 

The conference had a lot of corporate marketing types there. Not normally folks I hang out with. And what caught my attention was the language they used.

To them it seemed perfectly normal to talk about people having “conversations with brands”. When what they really meant meant was people watching TV ads, reading articles or commenting on Facebook pages.

Nobody has a conversation with a brand. We talk to people.

And in most cases the activities they were describing weren't conversational at all, they were one-way consumption.

But much worse than the fact that their language is misleading is that it disconnects them from their clients.

Normal business owners and managers don't talk about having conversations with brands. But because this internal jargon was so commonplace amongst the corporate marketing types they used it with “normal” people, not realising how it sounded.

And, of course, it's not just corporate marketing types that put off clients because of the internal language they use. We all do it sometimes.

Online marketers are prone to talking about lead generation and funnels: words their clients rarely use.

Leadership experts talk about authenticity and engagement: leaders don't. (Well, they may talk about it, but those aren't the words they use).

Have a look at the phrases you use in your business communications. How many of them are internal jargon or cliquey words your profession uses rather than being something your clients say.

Because the more you use language that your clients don't, the more you feel like an outsider to them.

The more you use the exact same lanugage they do, the more you'll feel like one of them.

More Clients Memorandum

You don’t have to play by the rules (proof)

Posted byIan Brodie on October 18th, 2015.

I had an interesting conversation with a very successful professional recently.

In fact he was doing so well the reason he was speaking to me was to find a way of moving more of his business over to online products. He was simply overloaded with all the client work and new business coming in and could no longer hope to do it all face to face.

The interesting thing was that he'd only been in his current sector for about 2 or 3 years. And yet he was now one of the most successful businesses in that field nationally.

How he did it is very instructional (though for obvious reasons I can't name him or the sector he works in).

Basically, when he first started looking to build a business in this area all the advice he got was that the only thing that worked to win business was word of mouth. Personal referrals or people seeing your work.

But without a track record he just didn't have an established base to work from. Instead he was forced to try some methods no one else was using.

In essence, he implemented a systematic and thorough targeting process.

He did in-depth research to identify potential clients and then to identify decision makers within those organisations.

Then he researched the individuals on the web and social media to figure out what made them tick and what they cared about.

Then he followed them on social media and began to interact in ways that added value to them.

Then after this initial nurturing, he'd email them to offer them something free. Of the ones who responded, he'd follow-up by email and phone. And he'd often send them something free (like his book) in the post.

Nothing particularly rcoket sciencey about it. But it worked. He turned prospects who didn't know him into warm leads in a matter of months.

Preety soon he found he was easily winning work from the established people in the sector who'd told him word of mouth was the only thing that worked.

Turn out that while recommendations are good, the sheer weight of the valuable content and relationship building this guy was doing was outweighing those recommendations by a large margin.

And because no one else was being anywhere near as thorough as him, he was picking up work very easily indeed.

These days he employs people to do all the social media, emailing and calling he initially did himself; freeing him to focus on the content and client work. He can pick and choose when and where he works.

Now it's not that the prevailing wisdom he'd heard about word of mouth being the only thing that worked was completely wrong. That was the way the industry veterans saw it.

But because no one had implemented a systematic marketing process like him, they just had no idea how effective it could be.

The truth is that many sectors aren't that well developed when it comes to marketing. So if you listen to what's working now – but then try something different – it can can pay huge dividends.

Of course you've got to be prepared to work at it. My friend worked very long hours and did all the “donkey work” himself in the early days.

And that's one reason he was so successful: no one else was prepared to put in that hard work. They were content to go along with accepted wisdom and play the “word of mouth” game.

Now it may be that the accepted wisdom in your sector is 100% right. It may be that what everyone else is doing is the only way to succeed.

Frankly, I doubt it.

Take a long hard look at that accepted wisdom and challenge it. Think about whether you could achieve the same results as my friend by doing something different.

More Clients Memorandum

Skip this at your peril

Posted byIan Brodie on October 11th, 2015.

I've been doing quite a few interviews for podcasts and hangout shows recently. On one of them I got asked the question:

“What core ideas do you believe everyone listening should embrace if they're going to be successful?”

You may have heard my answer before, but I make no apologies for banging this particular drum time and time again.

For me the most important principle in marketing for professional service businesses is to give Value In Advance. In other words to prove your value to potential clients in advance of them actually working with you by doing something useful for them.

I can't tell you how much time people waste on the uphill task of trying to convince potential clients how great they'd be to work with, when it would just be easier to prove it. 

Legendary professional services marketing expert David Maister used an approach to Value In Advance that many of us could do well to emulate.

When asked by a potential client to create a proposal and then present it to them, Maister offered them an alternative.

He explained how all the proposals and presentations they'd see would look pretty similar and wouldn't really shed any light on the key question of how good the professional would be to work with and how effective they are at what they do.

So he used to suggest to them that rather than him spending a bunch of time writing a proposal and then presenting it to them, he would come down and run a half day workshop for them to help progress their project.

At the end of the half day they'd know what he was really like to work with and have confidence in his abilities to get results for them based on the effectiveness of the workshop. And he'd know what they'd be like to work with as a client.

They could base their decision on real experience working with him, not just what he told them it would be like.

And, of course, none of their time together would be wasted. They'd have made progress whether they hired him or not. As opposed to having wasted a bunch of time with him creating and them presenting a sales document.

Could you do something similar in your business?

Even if you couldn't do exactly the same thing, the idea behind his approach of finding a way of turning a pitch into a value-added interaction together is a smart one that can be applied in many different situations.

I bet you could use it too.