More Clients Memorandum

Do you have this problem too?

Posted byIan Brodie on November 15th, 2015.

The biggest problem I think I have with marketing right now is my ever diminishing attention span.

Perhaps you have the same challenge too?

Left unchecked it can really kill your productivity.

I've barely typed a few sentences in this email yet I've already checked my email inbox and the latest sports news.

These days it's just too easy to fill gaps by checking something online and getting a hit of “new”.

Whether it's from Facebook, Twitter, your favourite website, email, TV, a video game, doesn't really matter.

The problem is it turns you into a passive consumer of information. And the need for a constant buzz of external input wrecks any chance you have of concentrating to get stuff done.

It also damages your creativity. Creativity comes partly from external stimulus, but also from quiet, reflective times when your mind relaxes, neurons fire and make new connections.

It's an act of willpower to cut off that stimulation. Or simply to refrain from checking all the different input streams that it's easier to look at than to do the hard work of thinking or writing.

Luckily, it doesn't require huge willpower. At least not yet.

So simply being aware of the problem and deciding to ignore the urge to check stuff has meant I've typed the rest of this email interruption free.

It's probably taken me a quarter of the time it would have taken had I been flitting backwards and forwards to my online feeds or had the TV on in the background.

So for right now, my advice is simply to catch yourself being distracted and resolve to focus for 10 minutes. User a timer – it works.

Then up it to 15 minutes, 20 minutes or more. Make it a game.

Build your “concentration muscle” and you'll get much better results.

The biggest problem I think I have with marketing right now is my ever diminishing attention span.

Perhaps you have the same challenge too?

Left unchecked it can really kill your productivity.

I've barely typed a few sentences in this email yet I've already checked my email inbox and the latest sports news.

These days it's just too easy to fill gaps by checking something online and getting a hit of “new”.

Whether it's from Facebook, Twitter, your favourite website, email, TV, a video game, doesn't really matter.

The problem is it turns you into a passive consumer of information. And the need for a constant buzz of external input wrecks any chance you have of concentrating to get stuff done.

It also damages your creativity. Creativity comes partly from external stimulus, but also from quiet, reflective times when your mind relaxes, neurons fire and make new connections.

It's an act of willpower to cut off that stimulation. Or simply to refrain from checking all the different input streams that it's easier to look at than to do the hard work of thinking or writing.

Luckily, it doesn't require huge willpower. At least not yet.

So simply being aware of the problem and deciding to ignore the urge to check stuff has meant I've typed the rest of this email interruption free.

It's probably taken me a quarter of the time it would have taken had I been flitting backwards and forwards to my online feeds or had the TV on in the background.

So for right now, my advice is simply to catch yourself being distracted and resolve to focus for 10 minutes. User a timer – it works.

Then up it to 15 minutes, 20 minutes or more. Make it a game.

Build your “concentration muscle” and you'll get much better results.

The biggest problem I think I have with marketing right now is my ever diminishing attention span.

Perhaps you have the same challenge too?

Left unchecked it can really kill your productivity.

I've barely typed a few sentences in this email yet I've already checked my email inbox and the latest sports news.

These days it's just too easy to fill gaps by checking something online and getting a hit of “new”.

Whether it's from Facebook, Twitter, your favourite website, email, TV, a video game, doesn't really matter.

The problem is it turns you into a passive consumer of information. And the need for a constant buzz of external input wrecks any chance you have of concentrating to get stuff done.

It also damages your creativity. Creativity comes partly from external stimulus, but also from quiet, reflective times when your mind relaxes, neurons fire and make new connections.

It's an act of willpower to cut off that stimulation. Or simply to refrain from checking all the different input streams that it's easier to look at than to do the hard work of thinking or writing.

Luckily, it doesn't require huge willpower. At least not yet.

So simply being aware of the problem and deciding to ignore the urge to check stuff has meant I've typed the rest of this email interruption free.

It's probably taken me a quarter of the time it would have taken had I been flitting backwards and forwards to my online feeds or had the TV on in the background.

So for right now, my advice is simply to catch yourself being distracted and resolve to focus for 10 minutes. User a timer – it works.

Then up it to 15 minutes, 20 minutes or more. Make it a game.

Build your “concentration muscle” and you'll get much better results.

The biggest problem I think I have with marketing right now is my ever diminishing attention span.

Perhaps you have the same challenge too?

Left unchecked it can really kill your productivity.

I've barely typed a few sentences in this email yet I've already checked my email inbox and the latest sports news.

These days it's just too easy to fill gaps by checking something online and getting a hit of “new”.

Whether it's from Facebook, Twitter, your favourite website, email, TV, a video game, doesn't really matter.

The problem is it turns you into a passive consumer of information. And the need for a constant buzz of external input wrecks any chance you have of concentrating to get stuff done.

It also damages your creativity. Creativity comes partly from external stimulus, but also from quiet, reflective times when your mind relaxes, neurons fire and make new connections.

It's an act of willpower to cut off that stimulation. Or simply to refrain from checking all the different input streams that it's easier to look at than to do the hard work of thinking or writing.

Luckily, it doesn't require huge willpower. At least not yet.

So simply being aware of the problem and deciding to ignore the urge to check stuff has meant I've typed the rest of this email interruption free.

It's probably taken me a quarter of the time it would have taken had I been flitting backwards and forwards to my online feeds or had the TV on in the background.

So for right now, my advice is simply to catch yourself being distracted and resolve to focus for 10 minutes. User a timer – it works.

Then up it to 15 minutes, 20 minutes or more. Make it a game.

Build your “concentration muscle” and you'll get much better results.

More Clients Memorandum

Make your marketing timeless

Posted byIan Brodie on November 8th, 2015.

Some things are just timeless, aren't they?

I'm just a little bit too young to remember the Beatles or the Stones in their prime, but if one of their hits comes on the radio it still sounds fresh to me.

Same goes with great art, great drama. Timeless.

At least some of your marketing should be like that too.

Of course, there's value in keeping up with the latest trends. I've been very successful with social media for lead generation for the last few years for example. But it's really been email that's been the timeless mainstay of my business.

Some marketing has a “best before” date. Works well for a few years until everyone starts doing it, then becomes less and less effective.

Other marketing has been working for decades and likely will for many to come: email marketing, direct mail, referrals.

Make sure you have some timeless marketing like this in your armoury.

More Clients Memorandum

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.

More Clients Memorandum

How I became human again

Posted byIan Brodie on October 4th, 2015.

Like many business owners I've always found it difficult to disconnect from work.

There always seems to be another client to help out, another tweak to my website, more I could do on social media.

I'd even work in the coffee shop when I went there every few days.

Without realising it, I was letting work take over my life.

Then a little while ago, Kathy suggested that instead of driving to the coffee shop I should walk there.

Can't do any harm for a few days I thought. It's about a 5 mile round trip. About an hour and a quarter. And the walk will do me some good.

So for the next few days we walked to the coffee shop.

And then we started walking in the evenings when we hadn't been out that day.

Pretty soon we were walking for about 90 minutes almost every day of the week.

Now at the start, my big concern had been the time. 90 minutes is a long time out of the working day. 

And indeed, for the first few weeks I ended up working late to make up the time.

Then over time I realised that despite taking 90 minutes out of the day for our walks, I wasn't getting anything less done. 

In fact, because I was spending more time away from the computer with time to think, I was having better ideas. And I was much more effective with my time when I was back at home.

I even started getting to bed at a reasonable hour – a big change for me.

Now I'm not saying you should suddenly start going for walks yourself. But I do believe that all of us need to find our own way of getting our work life balance right.

And it's my experience that by taking time out to think, away from your computer and the other trappings of work, you're much more effective when you return.

More importantly, you get to spend time with the people you care about and get a life back. 

More Clients Memorandum

Clear out your marketing trash

Posted byIan Brodie on September 27th, 2015.

A little while back Kathy gave me one of those looks that said “I've got a job for you and you're not going to like it”.

In this particular case the job in question was cleaning out the storage areas in one of our converted rooms in the loft.

We had the loft converted and then extended about 16 years ago, so surely there couldn't be too much rubbish up there, I thought.

Boy, was I wrong.

The storage area was jam packed with all sorts of rubbish. Mainly packaging from all the electronic gadgets, computers and printers I'd bought over the years.

I even found an old Zip drive (remember those?).

Many hours later and a trip to the tip to recycle all the cardboard and we finally had some space back in the loft.

All of a sudden we could put the furniture where we wanted it. We could move about without tripping over stuff. Everything in the room was just easier.

I got to thinking that maybe my marketing could do with some “spring cleaning” too. 

Sure enough, a few minutes thought identified a whole bunch of stuff that was clogging up my time. A regular event I go to out of duty that I get pretty much nothing from. A whole bunch of landing pages that lead to old email sequences that have long since been superseded.

Usually whenever we take on a new idea or project in our marketing we add it to the portfolio of things we're doing. And eventually, over time, we get as clogged up and overcrowded as my loft had become.

You might want to consider a bit of spring cleaning for your marketing too. Even better: whenever you add new activities, replace an existing one rather than just adding to the clutter.

It's just so much easier to get things done without all that clutter.

More Clients Memorandum

How to break your marketing

Posted byIan Brodie on September 20th, 2015.

Kathy and I were driving home late one night recently listening to the radio when we heard an ad from “the recruitment provider of choice for logistics operatives”.

We kind of looked at each other and grimaced when we heard it.

I think what they really meant was they found better jobs for truck drivers.

No matter how smart your targeting is, no matter what kind of brilliant offer you have, or clever tactics you might be using, if you can't communicate with your target clients in language they'll understand then your marketing is doomed.

I mean really, what makes people write phrases like “the recruitment provider of choice for logistics operatives”?

Who do they think is going to listen to that and go “oh wow, just the people I want to speak to”.

Of course, it's easy to drift into corporate-speak every now and then (though hopefully not as bad as this example). But if you do, your marketing is going to struggle to connect.

So make sure before you send that next email or update your website home page that the language you're using is plain and understandable by your target clients.

More Clients Memorandum

One topic? Really?

Posted byIan Brodie on September 16th, 2015.

n yesterday's video on “the Rule of One” for getting more impact with your emails, one of my rules was that you should focus on just one topic in each email.

Now I know that might sound difficult. I know you've got so much value to share with your audience you want to give them as much as possible every time you email.

But in this case, less is more.

No one wants to get the Encyclopedia Brittanica in their inbox every day.

If you've got lots to say, email frequently with one point in each email rather than sending less frequent emails with lots of points in them.

Few people have enough spare time on any given day to read 7 points in a 2,000 word email.

But most of us have a couple of minutes free each day to read one point in a 300 word email. 

So split your huge email into 7 short ones.

Many more people are likely to read it.

It breeds discipline too. Forces you to compress your thoughts and take out any extraneous material.

Give it a go :)