More Clients Memorandum

Could you do this?

Posted byIan Brodie on December 23rd, 2018.

I took up darts at the grand old age of 52.

It's not one of those sports that requires you to be at the peak of fitness.

But it is a lot of fun.

And the funny thing was, that within a month I was a better player than anyone I knew.

Two reasons really.

One is that most people don't play darts. It's easy to be better than people who don't play :)

And of those that do play, practically no one takes it seriously and practices properly.

I did.

Now obviously my marketing tip this week isn't that you take up darts Though it is a great game :)

What struck me from learning darts is how easy it is to become pretty good at some things rather quickly. Or at least to become better than the vast majority of people who either never try it, or never try to learn it seriously.

Sometimes marketing can seem quite daunting with a ton to learn.

But don't forget that marketing is a bit like darts. Or that old joke about escaping a bear. You just have to be that bit better than your competitors and often, that's not very hard.  

Take heart!

More Clients Memorandum

Do this before following up

Posted byIan Brodie on December 16th, 2018.

I've been talking quite a bit in my Sunday emails recently about the importance of nurturing relationships with your contacts.

But there's something you MUST do first before following up with important contacts.

It's get permission.

It's something we don’t often think of for personal follow-up.

Obviously, we get permission for email marketing and other types of “mass” follow up because people sign up for it themselves.

But typically if we meet someone face to face and they seem like a great potential client, we tend to just go ahead and do it.

The same goes for connections on LinkedIn.

It's pretty standard advice these days to connect with your target clients and then follow up with messages that add value (like a link to an article), ask questions to see if they have a problem you can help with, and then maybe get on a call with them.

It all sounds great until you think about it from the perspective of the person on the receiving end.

They connect with you and exchange pleasantries. Then you send them a message with a link to an article you think they'd find useful and they think “Well, I didn't ask for it but sure, it looks interesting”.

Then you send another.

“Oh, OK then”.

Then another.

“What? Another one. I'm too busy for this”.

Then you ask to speak to them on the phone.

If they're not really interested it becomes uncomfortable for them.

And if more than a handful of people are “nurturing” them in this way they end up being bombarded with well-meaning messages. It ends up feeling more like spam than nurturing.

Here's the answer: if you're going to follow-up with people you'd like to have as clients in a structured and systematic way, ask their permission first.

It can be as simple as a PS in a message you send them after connecting or meeting face to face:

“By the way, I like to try to keep in touch with my new contacts by sending articles and other resources I think you'll find useful every now and then – would that be OK?”

Most won't turn you down. Those that do would have just got annoyed by your nurturing anyway (though they wouldn't have said – most of us are too polite).

And once they've said yes, they're more likely to pay attention to what you send.

More Clients Memorandum

Cancel something

Posted byIan Brodie on December 9th, 2018.

In my last email I talked about how keeping top of mind with your best potential clients through regular communication is perhaps the most important thing you can do in your marketing.

But where on earth do you find the time for all that keeping in touch?

You cancel something.

If you go to 3 networking events a month, cancel one. Take the 3 or 4 hours you would have spent speaking to people you don't know and who are unlikely to ever become clients and spend it keeping in touch with much better prospects.

If you're addicted to webinars and haven't realised yet that they're largely teases with sales pitches: skip one a week and do follow-up instead.

Or instead of working by scrolling Facebook or Linkedin, spend the time contacting specific high potential clients to keep the conversation going with them.

There's always something you can cancel to make room for keeping in touch with your very best potential clients. 

More Clients Memorandum

The real value of follow-up

Posted byIan Brodie on December 2nd, 2018.

I talk a lot about nurturing relationships.

Adding value and building credibility and trust over time.

(So do a lot of people).

But the truth, I believe, is that the main value you get from nurturing relationships is much simpler.

It's being top of mind.

Most clients only buy high-value services every now and then.  And when they do, the majority of the time it's from a small number of suppliers who they already have in mind.

Sometimes that's because they've worked with them before.

But often it's simply because the supplier kept in touch. They benefit from what the marketing scientists call “mental availability”.

When the time is right, they spring to mind.

Of course, building credibility and trust makes you more likely to win vs competitors.

But the most important factor is that your potential clients actually think of you when they have a problem you can solve. If that's missing it doesn't matter how much credibility or trust you have in theory – it's never called into play.

So in many ways, the role of all your nurturing activity – be that emails, phone calls, stuff you send through the post, social media posts – is simply to get you noticed.

Of course, if your content is dull or it has no value, your clients aren't going to pay attention to it. So it won't work to get you top of mind.

But it doesn't have to be a breakthrough or work of genius every time.

Just interesting enough. Valuable enough.

Don't kill yourself trying to create a work of genius every time.

It has to be interesting. It has to be useful. But most important: you have to actually get it out there!

More Clients Memorandum

Secret PS power

Posted byIan Brodie on November 25th, 2018.

The hardest emails to write, I think, are emails that sell without seeming like sales pitches.

Every now and then it's fine to do a pure sales email.

But do too many and you'll lose your audience. A bit like if the ad breaks in TV shows were 20 minutes long.

So the majority of your emails need to focus on sharing valuable content.

The challenge is being able to sell in those emails without taking away from the content and without it feeling like the email is just a sales pitch.

There are some clever techniques you can use to build desire in your emails while still giving value.

But perhaps the simplest is to use a PS. And simple is good: it means it gets done.

You can write a specific PS that follows on from the content of the email and offers the next step. That could be an offer to your readers to contact you about helping them in that area or to go to a web page that offers a relevant product or service.

Or, like I often do, just have a standard PS you put on most emails that either promotes a product or service or offers something more for free which will then lead to a promotion.

It's easy to do. And it doesn't feel too salesy to either you or your readers.

Which means you can sell in almost every email without it feeling like you're selling at all. 

More Clients Memorandum

Don’t take thing too far like this

Posted byIan Brodie on November 18th, 2018.

I have a sneaking suspicion that you're a bit like me.

You don't want to be a pushy salesperson type.

You'd much rather have people approach you asking to work with you than you would to approach them with an offer.

In fact, you might even feel like “pitching” is somehow unethical or an annoyance to your potential clients.

I kind of feel like that too.

But today I reflected on my experience with buying coffee.

I'm no coffee connoisseur. Kathy's the one who appreciates a proper cup.

But we do have a “bean to cup” machine that grinds and makes a rather decent brew.

And it's my job to buy the beans.

I use an online service that sends us a couple of packets of coffee beans every 2 weeks.

Always high quality. Always freshly roasted in the last couple of weeks. And from a wide variety of countries and growers.

It's a little adventure every fortnight to open the parcel to see what we've got this time.

As I said, I'm no connoisseur. But I'm enjoying learning about the different types of beans and roasts and the different flavours.

I look forward to each parcel arriving to try the new beans.

And in all honesty, I wish they sold to me a bit more.

The only emails I get from them are notices that my parcel has been dispatched. And there's never any promotional material in the parcel.

I'd quite like to be offered some kind of special new bean sometimes. Or the chance to learn more about the origins of the coffee. Or maybe some gadgets to go with my coffee machine.

I suspect the people who run the company are rather like you and me: they don't want to be pushy or salesy and risk damaging their relationship with me.

But I wish they were more salesy (in a nice way). I wish they made me more offers.

It would enhance my enjoyment of the coffee significantly.

I wonder if the same was true for you?

I wonder if you offered more things for your clients or contacts to buy whether they'd actually appreciate it rather than feel it was too pushy?

If someone loves what you do then like me with my coffee supplier, they probably want more from you and don't mind being offered more products at all (as long as it's not too much, too often).

Worth thinking about?

More Clients Memorandum

Be more creative by being less creative

Posted byIan Brodie on November 11th, 2018.

My first ever job, back in the 80s, was in IT. Designing and programming self-maintenance systems for big computers.

Ironic given that now I can barely work my phone :)

But back then, I and everyone I worked with prided ourselves in how creative and innovative we were.

So when our firm introduced a new quality management philosophy full of processes and checklists and reusable code, we rebelled.

Big time.

We hated it. All these processes and standard ways of doing things would stifle our creativity. The very thing that made us special.

When, eventually, we were forced to use them, something very different happened.

Instead of spending our creativity reinventing the wheel on a task that had been done a hundred times before, forcing us to follow standard procedures freed up our creativity to focus on the key pieces of work that genuinely needed it.

We ended up being more creative at the things that mattered. By being less creative at the things that didn't.

And just as importantly, it freed up a lot of time to focus on those key creative tasks too.

One thing I've noticed with a lot of the professionals I work with (and with myself too) is we like to do something new every time.

We don't want to send out a standard follow-up message to people we meet at an event, we want to tailor a specific message just for them.

We don't want to use a proposal template. We want to create the perfect one every time.

All sounds great in theory. Unfortunately, we don't have the time or the mental energy to do it properly.

So we end up not following up at all. And we send in a completely unique but not very good proposal because we had to make all the boilerplate and standard stuff from scratch.

Next time you have a little bit of downtime between client work, think about creating some templates and standard processes for key tasks you have to do often. For example:

• A pre-recorded video that gets sent out to everyone who schedules a call with you to prepare them for the call while further building your credibility
• A pre-written series of follow-up emails you send in sequence to everyone who signs up for your lead magnet so they get the very best of your ideas without you needing to craft new emails all the time.
• A “pack” of personal follow-up items – articles or books to post, events to invite to, questions to ask – that can be used again and again with each new potential client you meet.
• A proposal template with the relevant sections and boilerplate in place so you don’t have to scrabble around when you have a short deadline for submission.
• Templated email responses for questions you often get asked or frequent requests for information.

Save your brainpower for the stuff that really does need to be creative and different every time.

More Clients Memorandum

It’s almost never either/or

Posted byIan Brodie on November 11th, 2018.

Sadly, it seems we live in a world where the Dunning-Kruger effect is writ large.

Those with the least experience and knowledge, but who are supremely confident in their prognoses get all the airtime.

Those who think a bit deeper and see the shades of grey get pushed to the sidelines.

The good news is that you and I don't have to play by the same rules as the masses. We can play smart.

When it comes to marketing, if someone tells you with absolute certainty that their approach is the absolute best in all situations, run a mile.

(Especially if it's an amazing new online course or tool that just so happens to be on launch right now at a never to be repeated price).

You almost always find that a mix of approaches works best, not just one.

Research by Analytic Partners in 2016 showed that if you run a marketing campaign on two platforms instead of one (with a platform being something like TV, radio, paid search or online video) then the ROI of your campaign goes up by 19%. Add another platform and it goes up by another 4% etc.

And this is without increasing your budget. You just allocated it to 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 platforms instead of one.

Now us smaller businesses don't have the time or budget to master 5 marketing platforms of course. But the point is clear. There's no “one best” anything. Lots of different marketing tactics work and they often work synergistically.

You often see this in the eternal battle between online and offline marketing. 

And, of course, the defenders of traditional marketing and the new online pretenders both miss the point. 

They work best together.

Not one or the other.

There's nothing better than face to face approaches to build relationships fast. Especially for high-value clients.

But there's nothing better than online marketing to build a big pipeline of potential clients to nurture “on autopilot” until they're ready to engage personally.

Always try to have a mix of both types of marketing in your business.

More Clients Memorandum

I refused to shake hands

Posted byIan Brodie on October 28th, 2018.

I refused to shake hands.

We'd just finished a big piece of work with a prestigious client.

It had gone well and the senior client sponsor had come over to say goodbye and thank us for our work.

I'd led the project, but I couldn't bring myself to shake her hand. Instead, I skulked around at the back of the group with my head down and briefly nodded acknowledgement.

It was incredibly childish.

But she'd been a nightmare.

Super smart. Ex McKinsey & Harvard. But a nightmare.

She treated her own team like dirt. Shouted at them and called them idiots. 

Consultants were just hired help who were expected to jump when she wanted, any time of day or night.

And she'd change presentations we prepared, mess them up, then blame us for the changes she'd made.

The project ended fine, of course. You do what you need to do to deliver a great result. But we were all drained at the end.

And on my last day before flying back to the UK I thought “you know what, I just can't shake her hand”.

I think she knew because she didn't push the issue.

When you run your own business or you're part of a smaller firm, one of the huge advantages you have is you don't have to take on clients like this.

In the long run, it's never worth it. Your energy and your sanity are worth much more than the fees.

And if you're doing your marketing right, there'll be another, better, client coming along soon.

More Clients Memorandum

Have you let this happen to you

Posted byIan Brodie on October 21st, 2018.

I've been doing some analysis recently on different types of networks and their value as sources of clients (more on that in an upcoming email).

But one thing I did as part of the process that kind of shocked me was to look back at my own networks. Particularly the close contacts I have in business.

Back when I was primarily doing big consulting projects rather than online training I had half a dozen or so very senior contacts in client organisations who I would say I was close to. People I could pick the phone up to any time and ask a favour of (and they'd do the same to me).

Not surprisingly, they were a really strong source of client work for me over the years. Sometimes directly. Sometimes through referrals.

When I think of them now I realise they've all got one thing in common:

I haven't been in touch with them for years.

I've got lots of excuses. I'm really busy. I don't do big consulting projects any more. Blah blah.

The truth is these were friends at the time and I just let them drop off my radar.

Not only is that bad for business, it's bad friendship.

Easy to fall into of course. Especially if you're a bit introverted like me. But not a good habit.

My goal is to reconnect with these folks – primarily just as a friend. But no doubt it will be good for business too.

Have you let the same thing happen to some of your best contacts? People who could give you or refer you business but you haven't worked with for a while so they're slowly drifting out of your attention.

It's worth taking a good look at some of your best older contacts from a few years ago and doing a sanity check to see if you're unthinkingly letting your relationship with them die.

Now might be a good time to give it a boost.