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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.

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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.

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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.

More Clients Memorandum

The missing link in marketing’s most venerable formula

Posted byIan Brodie on October 6th, 2019.

I got an email from a subscriber whe, like me, is a lover of magic. He wanted to know if and how he could make use of his hobby in his marketing.

The answer was “maybe” and I'll explain in a second.

I'm a big fan of one of marketing's oldest formulae: AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action).

But as it's often taught, there's a missing link.

Because the important point about AIDA is that you're not just looking to get anyone's attention. You're not just looking to get them interested in anything or to desire anything or take any action.

It's all got to be aligned.

You want the attention of the people you specifically want to take your action. So whatever you use to get attention must target those people.

You need to get their interest. But not just in anything. It needs to be in something related to the action you want them to take.

You need the desire you build to be about the action you want them to take.

Often, you see AIDA applied without that alignment. Especially the attention part.

People will try stunts and tricks to get your attention – like the Facebook ads you used to see with red boxes around them or attractive faces (and other body parts) that had nothing to do with the product they were promoting.

They got attention all right. But the attention of the wrong people with no real interest in the product.

In the case of my subscriber wanting to use his magic hobby in his marketing, the key is to make it relevant and aligned with what he wants to sell.

You can get someone's attention with a magic trick. But if that attention isn't related – even tangentially – to what you're promoting, then it's wasted.

For example, if you did a magic trick where you burned a $100 bill, then magically restored it – that would get attention. But it would need to be linked to some sort of product that helped you avoid “burning money”. 

That would make sense and would flow nicely on to building interest and desire in the product and to people taking action to find out more.

But if the product was completely unrelated it would fall flat. It would be like shouting “fire” to get attention then saying “now that I have your attention, I'd like to talk about our new range of kitchens”.

That kind of attention-grabbing just annoys people.

So in all your marketing, make sure there's a link between how you grab their attention and what you then do to build interest and desire and the action you'd like them to take. 

More Clients Memorandum

Action Breeds Action

Posted byIan Brodie on September 29th, 2019.

Last week I mentioned that getting your audience to take action is an immense step towards getting them to buy from you because it gives them confidence in their own ability to achieve something.

Ideally with your help, of course.

There's something else action does.

It breeds more action.

When we receive emails or any communication we tend to mentally classify them into a few distinct piles.

There's a pile of stuff we're going to ignore.

There's a pile of stuff we're going to take action on.

And there's a pile in between. A pile we'll read and take notice of, but not necessarily act on.

Hopefully, your marketing doesn't end up in the first pile. And if you're sending people useful, relevant, interesting information it probably won't.

But there's a good chance it will end up in the “read but don't do anything” pile.

Generally speaking, most people read email newsletters – even great ones – and don't do anything.

They might think “good idea” or “I'll try that at some point”.

But it's relatively rare that they do anything in the next 48 hours directly resulting from the email.

That's not because the email isn't good. It's just that it's not immediately actionable.

That's fine: not every email could or should be immediately actionable.

But if you go for a long time without any immediate actions your readers can take, they begin to see your emails more as entertainment than advice.

Nice to read. Nice to re-affirm their beliefs. Nice to get some new ideas they might do something with someday.

But not emails where they immediately expect to do something when they see your name as the sender.

The downside of that is that eventually, you really do need them to take action if you want them to buy something from you (or get on a call to discuss it).

Because if they've never taken action on any of your emails, then asking them to buy something is a heckuva first ask.

On the other hand, if they expect to take action on your emails then when that action is to click to buy something or to set up a call with you, it's much less of a jump.

Go check your outbox: what was the last email or other communication you sent to potential clients?

Did it have an action in it that was easy for them to do?

What about the one before that? And the one before that?

If you have to go back a long long way before you find something that isn't purely educational and instead suggests an action, you might have a problem.

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Why action is your greatest marketing weapon

Posted byIan Brodie on September 22nd, 2019.

If you think through the reasons why you typically hesitate to buy something big when you're a potential client yourself, it can give you clues on what you need to do in your own marketing.

Let's say I was looking to hire a personal trainer.

I'd want to know if the trainer was good at their job, of course, and had successfully helped people like me get fit.

But at the back of my mind, I'd always be worrying: “maybe it worked for them, but I'm different.”

Maybe I won't be able to do the exercises. Or stick to the plan. Or find the time. Or a whole host of other reasons why it won't work for me specifically.

If you perform a service for people, or coach them or advise them or train them then they're likely to have similar concerns.

“Will this service work for me? Am I coachable? Will I be able to follow this advice? Will I be able to implement what I've learned in the training?”

Normally, of course, we call those things objections and salespeople learn techniques to overcome them.

But overcoming objections is tough.

It means being persuasive enough that the person with the objection ignores it or overrules it.

And that's not easy when the objections are primarily about the person themselves being unsure if they'll be able to do something. How do you persuade someone of that?

A much better approach is to get the person to take action that will prove to them – at least in a small way – that they can do this.

If the personal trainer sent me a video with a couple of simple exercises and got me to do them every day for 5 days, then that would give me much more confidence that I'd be able to do the full program than any amount of clever persuasion techniques.

And it's why, in your marketing, you should be trying to get your potential clients to take action.

A lead magnet is a great place to do this.

Normally with lead magnets we focus on them being attractive so that potential clients sign up to get them. And we focus on them delivering value, because that raises our credibility.

But ideally, we should also use our lead magnets to get our potential clients to take action. 

Even if it's a small action, if it gets results for them it will significantly raise their confidence that they too can do this. And that will go a long way to getting them ready to buy something from you.

More Clients Memorandum

“Persuasion” is the enemy

Posted byIan Brodie on September 15th, 2019.

If you pay a lot of attention to what's in vogue in marketing then you'll know that the dominant theme over the last decade or so has been persuasion.

Whether that's copywriting or NLP or all sorts of tricks and techniques to try to get people to do what you want: persuasion is sexy.

We've come to believe that marketing is all about persuasion. Take what you have and convince people they want to buy it.

The best selling books on marketing are titles like Influence, Persuade and Hooked.

They're all about clever tools and techniques you can use to get people to do what you want.

Persuasion is sexy to marketing people because it puts them at the centre of the universe. It spins a tale where no matter what the product is, give it to a great marketer and they'll persuade people to buy it.

And it's nonsense.

Or more accurately, while a great marketer can improve the sales of any product; their skills at persuasion are by far the least important thing in marketing.

Years ago, back when I was still active in the world of close-up magic, I was lucky enough to attend a small workshop with one of the world's few true geniuses, Juan Tamariz.

At the workshop, Tamariz talked about what made a great magic trick. At the time (and still today in fact) the dominant school of thought in magic was that presentation was the most important factor in a great trick. You have to engage your audience, entertain them, tell great stories.

“No” said Tamariz.

Presentation is important. But it's just the final layer.

Much more important than the presentation is the trick itself and how magical it is.

If you could walk into a room and suddenly levitate and start flying, it wouldn't matter how you presented it; it would be utterly magical.

On the other hand, if people see through your trick and guess how it's done it doesn't matter how well you present it, it's not magical. It might be a good story, but it's not magic. 

Next in importance is how you routine the trick so that your audience's focus is in all the right places. So that they see the magic and not the secret moves.

Finally comes the presentation. The layer of entertainment you put on top to enhance the trick.

Marketing is a lot like magic in my experience.

We think that persuasion is the most important part, just like many magicians think presentation is the most important part.

But much more important than persuasion is your offer.

Creating a product or service that your ideal clients actually want.

That's the first and most vital job of marketing. Understand who your ideal clients are and what they value; and make sure your product or service delivers that.

Next is clear communication. Making sure, just like with magic, that your audience is focused in the right places. In other words, they “get” the value that your product or service is going to bring them.

Only then does persuasion kick in.

Persuasion can enhance a great offer with clear communication.

But it can't replace it.

It's trendy to talk about clever persuasion techniques and to think that somehow this is where we should be focusing. 

But the good news, especially if you don't have months to spend learning these fancy techniques, is that what really counts is the fundamentals.

Make sure you're offering something that your clients truly want. Make sure you communicate the value to them in clear and simple terms. 

Do that and you won't have to worry too much about persuasion.