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Why pricing is about people

Posted byIan Brodie on July 5th, 2015.

It's staggering how fast markets change sometimes.

I recenly bought a table top tripod to use for some LED lights I've got for when I'm doing stuff on webcam.

A few years ago I'd have gone into a camera shop and probably paid about £30. Instead I went on Amazon, paid £12 and got it delivered the next day.

Not that there aren't really expensive table top tripods on Amazon too. Some many times more expensive than I'd ever have seen in a camera shop.

What's happened is that because I now have visibility of suppliers across the country (or world), the “average Joe” price of products made for people who just want something basic has plummeted.

Simple economics.

But the same visibility means that very high end products for people who do care about differences in performance are now viable.

No point in a high street camera shop stocking a £100 table top tripod when there's probably only one person in the area who would buy it. But it's completely viable for an online store that services customers worldwide.

High end niche markets have suddenly become big business.

The same polarisation has happened in service businesses too.

Clients can find a host of cheap suppliers who can do a great job of standard consulting, coaching, legal, accountancy and other services.

But some “connoisseur” clients are willing to pay an awful lot more to get just what they need. The trick is to know who those clients are, what they're willing to pay more for, and how to reach them.

So if you want to charge a premium for your services these days, it's not about differentiating yourself or adding extra value for the typical client. It's about finding the exceptional client and figuring out what they'll be willing to pay a big premium for.

And then, of course, being able to deliver it.

Don't aim for the masses. Look for exceptional clients willing to pay for exceptional service. 

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The key to outsourcing or automating your marketing

Posted byIan Brodie on June 28th, 2015.

As your business grows it can be increasingly difficult to manage all your marketing activities yourself so outsourcing becomes an important consideration.

But it's all too easy to get it horribly wrong.

I've seen business owners waste fortunes and just as importantly waste a ton of time handing over the reins of key elements of their marketing to people who promised amazing results but failed to deliver.

I've had outsourcing problems myself. I hired someone on oDesk to build a wordpress plugin for me but it cost over twice as much as estimated and never really worked properly.

The biggest problem that most people have with outsourcing is that they farm out activities that they don't really understand. 

If you don't understand something and you give it to others to do instead then it can be very difficult to know who the right people are to select.

What criteria do you use? How do you know they'll do a good job?

Very difficult if you don't know what a good job looks like.

You have to rely on their own claims, or reviews they've got from others (take it from me: you can't rely on the star system on oDesk).

On the other hand, if you make sure you understand something before outsourcing it then you can ask the right questions of potential suppliers. You'll be able to tell whether they know what they're talking about and whether they'll be able to do exactly what you're looking for.

So even if long term you don't plan to do all your marketing yourself you should definitely make sure you understand how it should be done so that you can get the right people to do it.

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The real secret to finding the time for marketing

Posted byIan Brodie on June 21st, 2015.

I recently spoke to a couple of people who told me they were struggling to find the time to work on their marketing.

To be honest, over the years I've ended up with a bit of a bee in my bonnet about “finding the time” for marketing.

You see, I don't believe time is the issue. There is always time for things we prioritise.

Most people who log their time over a week are staggered at how much of it they spend watching TV, or doing pseudo-work like chatting in Linkedin or Facebook groups, surfing the web or going to low-value networking events.

You can never remove those low-value activities entirely of course. And life would be very dull if you never had any leisure time or had to work flat out all the time.

But if we're honest, all of us can find an extra few hours a week.

So rather than saying “I couldn't find the time to work on my marketing” I think it's much more positive to be truthful and say “it wasn't a big enough priority for me”.

Saying you couldn't find the time makes it seem like it was out of your hands and there was nothing you could do about it. That events conspired against you.

Saying it wasn't a big enough priority for you puts the solution in your own hands: make it a bigger priority and do something about it.

I'd advise taking the route that puts the solution in your hands. Take responsibility and take action.

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How to use feedback so it doesn’t mess you up

Posted byIan Brodie on June 14th, 2015.

I like the phrase “feedback is the breakfast of champions”. Feedback can really help power your progress in any field.

But it can also mess you up if you interpret it wrongly.

My first tip on feedback is to sit back and assimilate it rather than reacting.

Normally when we react quickly to feedback it's either because we feel affronted by criticism or pleased with praise. But you need to pull back from your emotional reaction and think about how you can use the feedback to improve; not how you can prove it's wrong or affirm it's right.

My second tip is to pay the most attention to feedback from two types of people.

The first is your paying clients or those with high potential to become one. How they react to what you do is clearly important if they're typical of your ideal clients.

The second is experts with the maturity to give you feedback based on their experience of your ideal clients NOT their own personal reactions.

Far too often even experts will base their feedback to you based on their own reactions to your marketing. But since they're usually not typical of your clients their reactions aren't really valid indicators for you.

You need feedback from people mature enough to detach from their own reactions and to be able to judge how your clients will react and/or what is likely to work for those clients.  

My third tip is to always take feedback in context.

In particular, watch out for two things:

Firstly that you're not just acting on noise from a vocal minority. 

Some things in marketing natually lead to biased feedback. Take email frequency for example. Some people complain when they feel they're getting too many emails from you. No one complains when they get too few. Instead they just begin to lose touch with you and you cease to be top of mind.

Similarly, when you ask your best clients for feedback you'll get affirmation of the things you're already good at. It's those strengths which drew those clients to you in the first place. But unless you get feedback from people who didn't hire you, or who hired you and left, you'll never know what you could have done to win them over.

Seondly, think through what the downside of any change you might make based on the feedback could be compared with the downside highlighted in the feedback itself.

If someone thinks you're emailing them too often the downside is relatively minor. Worst case is that one person stops reading your emails or unsubscribes. Chances are if they feel you're emailing too often then they're not your biggest fan anyway.

If you decrease your email frequency to accommodate that one person then the downside could be that you drop from top of mind for a whole bunch of people for whom the frequency was perfect and who really do get value from what you send.

That's not good at all.

There are always unintended consequences of any change. Try to pre-empt what they might be when you're reacting to feedback.

And finally, try to “triangulate” any feedback. It's rearely wise to act on any feedback until you've heard it from at least three different sources.

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Why “lightbulb moments” are the secret to sales

Posted byIan Brodie on June 7th, 2015.

OK. So nothing is really the “secret” of sales. There's no one single thing that guarantees you success.

But whether we're talking about sales online, on webinars or face to face;  there is one thing that today makes a huge difference in whether you emerge from the fray having signed up a client.

It's your ability to create “lightbulb moments”.

Of course, the foundation of all sales is to solve your client's problems. To match your services or products with their issues, challenges or goals so they can see that by working with you they'll egt the results they want.

Trouble is, today that's a commodity.

Partly because clients have access to so many more competent suppliers these days who can all propose solid solutions to their problems. Gone are the days where geography gave service providers little local monopolies. 

Clients can now find dozens of competent service providers – often willing to do the work at very keen prices.

And they do their own research too. They already know the basics of what their problem is and what needs to be done to solve it before they ever speak to you (or at least they think they do).

So if you want to win the work (and get paid a reasonable fee for doing it) you have to do something more.

Many people will tell you you need to differentiate. But if your client doesn't see the value in your difference it doesn't get you far.

Often the best way to win a sale is to change the frame of reference. Give your potential client a “lightbulb moment” that brings new insights and gets them thinking about their problem in a different way. That way when all the other suppliers are solving problem X with a product that ticks boxes A, B and C, you've changed things so the client actually wants a solution to problem Y and needs boxes D, E and F to be ticked.

It's the same with webinars.

To succeed with webinars you need to tread a tricky line. Give too much information away and people won't feel they need to buy your product. Give too little and they'll feel cheated, like they haven't had value. 

I've seen it happen both ways. Webinars where the presenter gives away a ton of value and details yet doesn't get many sales (I've done that myself).

And webinars where the presenter only shares the “what” and not the “how” where most attendees feel short changed because they already knew the “what”.

Lightbulb moments change the frame again. Instead of dancing between telling people the “what” they already know or going into details on the “how” that will preclude sales; you focus on “what” level information they don't know.

It's why webinars introducing a new technology or technique work really well. The value the attendees get is in the new idea – they don't need the details yet. So they rave about the webinar and they're happy to buy the product to get the details.

I got that the first webinar I watched on Linkedin about 5 years ago. Lots of lightbulbs, and I bought the training product. The same when I saw a webinar about a technique for writing a book quickly. All new for me so I was really satisfied by the webinar, and I bought the training product.

Same happened for Facebook advertising and marketing funnels a few years ago too. Webinar lightbulbs = Ian getting out the credit card.

So what lightbulbs do you set off for your clients? It's not easy to come up with them. You have to really know your stuff and think hard to create them.

But it's an awful lot easier to sell if you're bringing new insight than if you're just treading old ground.

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“Can’t I just outsource marketing and sales?”

Posted byIan Brodie on May 31st, 2015.

If you don't enjoy marketing and sales then it can be very tempting just to think “why can't I just outsource it and be done with it?”

After all, it's the consulting/coaching/training/legal work/accountancy that you do that adds value to the client. you just need someone to get you more of them.

Two big, big problems with this approach.

The first is that if you don't undertand what good marketing and sales should look like for your business, you'll end up hiring someone who does the wrong things for you.

I've seen businesses spend small fortunes on websites that simply didn't work for them (but looked great). On SEO that got them #1 ranking for searches on keywords that never turned into enquiries. On telemarketing that they were told worked for everyone but it turned out didn't work for them.

You've got to understand something before you outsource it, otherwise you're going to get screwed.

The second problem is that in all honesty, in many businesses, getting clients is the difficult bit. Providing the service is easy.

It's all well and good saying “all I need is someone to get me more clients” but if the real value in the business is that client acquisition, then in truth, they'll end up getting the lions share of the profits.

It's happened in the legal sector where lead generation firms get customer enquires and sell them on to law firms. It's the lead generation firms who are making all the money and the law firms who are just scraping by.

Money always flows to the rarest valuable talent. If you can't or won't learn how to win clients for yourself, then you're going to end up paying through the nose to someone who can and will.

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The sacrifice of success

Posted byIan Brodie on May 24th, 2015.

My email last Sunday was about a friend of mine who's just launched an online training product, and the work he had to put in to get it going.

Whenever you're launching something big and new you often have to make sacrifices in terms of time and money to make a breakthrough.

That might mean accepting a lower income as you do less client work to focus on the new thing. Or it might mean you work weekends or late into the night for a while.

There's a lovely saying I heard a few years ago that “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won't, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can't”.

There's a large grain of truth in that.

I often speak to people who want more clients, but won't give up their paid work and won't work extra hours to get them.

Or who want to have passive income but don't want the pain of creating products that goes with it.

Does. Not. Compute.

Sure, there are shortcuts. Ways of doing things efficiently.

But lets not kid ourselves. If you want significantly different results you've got to do something significantly different.

If you're not prepared to do that, that's fine. It doesn't make you a bad person. But be honest with yourself. Accept it and get on with your life rather than constantly looking for miracles.

But if you are prepared to do that hard work, now we're talking.

I believe there's more opportunity for small firms and individuals today than there's ever been.

Clients can find the right people to work with in ways that weren't possible even a few years ago – IF you put the work into being found and finding them.

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Your choice…

Posted byIan Brodie on May 17th, 2015.

I met up with an old colleague a while back who'd recently launched an online training program. We'd spoken about it about 6 months earlier and I'd given him some options and ideas.

6 months later it was live.

Not that it had been easy. It has been a ton of work. He told me he almost cried when he finally launched it, and again when he got his first sale.

Later that evening we went out and met up with a whole load of other ex colleagues for a reunion event. All doing well. But in truth, all really doing the same thing they were doing 10 or 20 years ago when we worked with them.

Many were intrigued by the different business model we'd adopted. But for most it just all seemed like too much work. Why create content, do video or podcasts, write a book, when you can do OK just farming your exsiting contact network?

One guy had even been offered a multi-thousand pound advance to write a book but he turned it down because he could earn the same amount with just a few days consulting.

These were great people, don't get me wrong. But if I had to take bets about who, in 10 years time, would have a thriving business rather than still ticking over doing the same old same old, it would be my friend who launched the product.

He had the courage to do something different. And the discipline and strength to stick at it throughout all the hard work of making it happen.

I think most markets are a bit like this.

The majority of suppliers are content to just keep plugging away doing the same things that worked OK for them in the past. Unwilling to put in the effort and make the sacrifices to get a big change.

Which means that if you are prepared to put in the work to learn and do something different, you have a huge advantage.

Maybe the marketing approaches I teach in Momentum Club are your “something different” that will make a big difference to your success.

Or maybe it's something else.

Either way, it really is your choice. You can stand out and do something different. Or keep doing the same old same old and hoping for better results.

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New environment = new ideas

Posted byIan Brodie on May 10th, 2015.

I like to get out of the house on Sunday. There's something about working from home that makes you go a bit stir-crazy sometimes, so getting out is nice.

And I've found recently that changing my environment can do wonders for productivity.

I spent half a day in a coffee shop and wrote four and a half thousand words on a monster article I'm working on (who knows, it might even turn into a book at some point).

I don't like to take calls when I'm out (seems rather rude to shout away into a phone when people are trying to grab a coffee).

But for thinking, planning and writing it just seems to work well to sit by yourself with a bit of a general buzz going on behind you in a coffee shop.

I even used to do it when I was running big projects as an employed consultant. I'd escape from the office every few days to get some quiet time for thinking and planning. Although I must admit, sometimes I was planning my escape from employment :)

I'd advise you to try to change your environment every now and then. Get out and do some work from a coffee shop. Or sit in a meeting room by yourself for a while.

It can make quite a big difference.

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3 mistakes most bloggers and emails make with writing

Posted byIan Brodie on May 3rd, 2015.

I'm not going to pretend I'm some kind of brilliant writer. But I've had my share of success through emails, blog posts, articles and a best selling book.

So I often get asked to give feedback on other people's writing. Here are some basic mistakes I see made time and time again:

1. Trying too hard to be clever

I can't tell you the number of times I've seen people trying to use clever puns, aliteration, cutesy phrases. Especially in the vital areas of headlines and email subject lines.

It doesn't work.

In marketing you want clarity first. If you can be clear and write something clever or funny at the same time that's great. But very few people can. Instead they write something vaguely humourous that fails to get across the key points.

Focus first on being clear. And in your headlines and subject lines make sure you get across the benefits of what you have to offer.

2. Writing that's too complex

This was my big achilles heel when I started. I'd have big long sentences with complex clauses and multiple commas.

Often the only person who could understand what I'd written was me. And if I read it a day later sometimes even I couldn't decipher what it meant.

It's a particular challenge when you have quite detailed knowledge and you see shades of grey.

You want to caveat everything. Lay out all the different situations and complexities.

But if you confuse all your readers you achieve nothing.

It takes work to simplify your writing yet still get across a complex message. But you have to put in that work.

3. Writing that doesn't go anywhere

A lot of writing just peters out.

The writer makes their main point, then kind of rambles on a bit. Then it just ends.

In almost all marketing-related writing you need a call to action. And I've seen many people fight shy of calls to action.

They don't want to be too pushy. They're hoping people will just spontaneously know what to do and do it.

But they rarely do.

If your article has given a clear reason for taking some action, then ask your readers to take that action.

If it makes sense and it's a fit for them, they will. If it isn't a fit they won't.

Don't make their decisions for them by not giving them the choice.

Of course, now I've said that all good marketing-related writing needs a call to action, I need to have one too.

Normally it would be something suggesting you join the %mctrial% trial of Momentum Club.

But what I really want you to do this week is just pick one piece of your writing. A important blog post or email for example.

Read through it and just tick off where you're trying to be too clever. Where your writing is complex. And mark a big X if you don't have a call to action.

Do this for your next half dozen pieces of writing and I promise you it will improve.