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How NOT to use Linkedin

Posted byIan Brodie on May 18th, 2014.

Linkedin is a great tool for professionals with lots of useful features for finding new high potential people to connect with. You can use searches, check the contact lists of the people you know well, or monitor activity on the “newsfeed”.

But when you do identify someone you'd like to connect when, my advice is DON'T use Linkedin's “connect” button.

It sends a hugely impersonal message asking your common contacts to connect you by pushing some buttons and sending on a cover note to your connection requests. Something they're probably unfamiliar with and so not 100% comfortable doing.

The standard connection request doesn't give you a chance to ask if they know them well and how they know them. It doesn't let you say why you want to connect or what value you'd bring to the connection.

Much better to actually phone your contact up and have a discussion. Or email them.

Ask how well they know this person you'd like to connect to. Tell them why you'd like to connect and how the other person would benefit. Ask their advice: “if you were me how would you go about connecting with them?”.

You're much more likely to get a result than sending a bog-standard connection request.

Funny story by the way: Linkedin seem to have changed the way the button works. It used to go to a second page with options. Now there's a drop down next to it and the button immediately sends the connection request with no tailoring.

Anyway, I was showing some clients a few tips on Linkedin at a training course. You can probably guess where this is going…

I showed them how to use the advanced search to find high potential contacts to connect with and then said “whatever you do, don't just hit this connect button….” just as I hit the connect button. And instead of going to a second page that I could quit from as expected, I got a little message saying my connection request had been sent.

I have to admit, a swear word came shooting out of my mouth. Luckily the client is a fun crowd and they just laughed rather than being offended.

I quickly shot off apology messages to the chief executive, managing partner and fellow consultants the message went to and thankfully they had a laugh about it.

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Follow up wisdom hiding in plain sight

Posted byIan Brodie on May 11th, 2014.

I was asked to join a panel on a webinar last week to discuss “whether sales should follow up content marketing”.

There were a lot of strong feelings. Panellists reported feeling hassled and “spammed” when business called them after downloading a whitepaper or signing up for reports.

And many businesses struggle to know how to follow up appropriately once they've made first contact. “Am I being too pushy? Am I following up fast enough?”.

Here's the answer hiding in plain sight: let your potential clients tell you themselves what's appropriate.

I don't mean just ask them outright. They probably won't know. I mean let their actions tell you.

Whenever someone signs up for my regular emails they usually fall into two camps. One group is ready to take action straight away, the other (usually larger group) needs some warming up.

So I send helpful emails with useful information to build credibility and trust. But I mix in emails that ask questions or offer something for them to do like watch a video or complete a survey.

Who should I focus my personal follow-up on? It's the people that take actions that show they're the most interested. The ones who watch the videos straight away or hit reply and ask me questions or give feedback.

I don't ignore the others. They keep getting my regular emails and I hope they find them useful. I've learned that at some point something will happen and many of them will get more active and I'll pick it up then.

You can do the same no matter how you interact with potential clients. Keep a regular “drip feed” of valuable communications going: invite them to events, mail them useful articles, invite them for coffee. Make sure you can see when they take action and if they do, increase the follow-up.

That way you'll get your follow up right. Fast and frequent for the ones that want it. Regular and value-added for those who aren't ready yet.

And it's effective follow-up that wins clients.

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Bad advice that makes me mad

Posted byIan Brodie on May 4th, 2014.

These days I get increasingly frustrated at the growing wave of advice for professionals saying you need to become seen as an expert in your field.

Not that there's anything wrong with becoming seen as an expert, it's something I often advise myself (though it's far from the only way to succeed, and it's not suited to everyone).

What's getting me worked up is that all the advice on how to do it seems to be missing the point about what it really takes to become seen as an expert.

I've read article after article and a bunch of books which all essentially say “write articles, publish a book, do videos, webinars, podcasts”.

And yes, if you want to be seen as an expert you absolutely have to get your message out to people.

But the problem is that literally millions of people are out there writing articles, publishing books, doing videos, webinars and podcasts.

And almost none of them are seen as experts in their field.

The point isn't that you publish. That's a given.

The point is that you have to have something new to say. Something that resonates with your target audience. Something insightful that gives them a new perspective and helps them do something they couldn't before. Something that simplifies the complex or clears up the fog.

We don't see Seth Godin as an expert because he's written lots of books. It's because his books have great ideas in them.

We don't see Michael Porter as a leader in the field of strategy because he wrote a couple of books. Lord knows how many wannabe strategy experts have written a couple of books. We see Porter as a leader because his 5 Forces and Value Chain models brought new insights and a new way of thinking when they were published. And they've become staples of pretty much every strategy analysis ever since.

So of course, we need to know the mechanics of how to get published, to write blog posts, to do podcasts and videos in just the same way that a great vineyard needs to know how to get its wine out to its customers. But it's not the distribution system that makes a wine or an expert great. It's what's in the bottle or article or video or book.

Far too much of what passes for content marketing is simply common knowledge regurgitated.

If you want to become known as an expert, your most important task is to create ideas and insights that are both valuable to your clients and genuinely different to what everyone else is saying. Focus on that first, then worry about how to get it out to the world.

Focus on that and you'll be doing both yourself and your audience a favour.

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You get the clients your marketing deserves

Posted byIan Brodie on April 27th, 2014.

I wrote an article a while ago called How To Market Without Using Hype.

The article made the staggeringly obvious but often overlooked point that if you don't feel comfortable using hype or exaggeration in your marketing (and you shouldn't), then the best way to avoid it is to target clients who don't respond to it.

Because, let's be honest, some people do respond to hype. They fall for exaggerated claims and get rich overnight stories.

You'll drive yourself mad trying to win those sort of people as clients. You'll either do honest, realistic marketing and they'll go elsewhere to others prepared to promise them riches.

Or you'll swallow your principles, make ridiculous claims, then feel bad about it when they don't do as well as you'd promised.

It's a lose-lose situation. But there's no way round it with those sorts of clients.

Best to target experienced, realistic buyers. Ones who can spot hype and unrealistic claims.

The same goes for other things you're looking for in your clients.

Want clients who care about more than money? Then talk about more than money in your marketing. Be brave enough to say what you believe in and turn away those who don't share your values. Do your marketing well enough and there'll be plenty who do.

Obvious really: you get the clients your marketing deserves.

But it's often tricky to drag yourself away from copycat marketing. Marketing the same way your competitors do because you think they're doing better than you.

Marketing the way the “gurus” tell you to market because, well, they're the “gurus”.

But their clients aren't your clients. You need to market in a way that will work for your clients, not theirs.

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Breaking the tyranny of old, comfortable habits

Posted byIan Brodie on April 20th, 2014.

Have you ever had a moment where you've said something and as you're saying it you kind of can't believe what you're saying?

I was talking to some new friends this weekend about some of our experiences and how our lives have changed over time. I was telling the story of how I used to leave the house in a taxi at 5.30am on Monday morning to fly out to wherever I happened to be working that week and then return on a Friday.

And especially about how travel turned from being glamorous to being a burden. How every Monday morning I'd find myself thinking “why am I doing this?”.

I did the “fly out on a Monday” thing as a consultant for about 13 years. And for about six or so of them I'd be thinking “why am I doing this?”

As I explained this it dawned on me that it had taken rather a long time for me to go from realising I wasn't enjoying it to actually doing something about it. Over six years. Wow.

Some of the work I do with clients these days gives them a new perspective on their marketing. Shows them things they just hadn't thought of before.

But often, just like me on a Monday morning, they already know they need something different. Sometimes they even know what that different thing is.

But when you've done something for a long, long time it becomes part of you. It's just what you do. It's easy. You know how to do it.

Even though you don't like it, or it's not really getting you the results you need, it's a lot less scary than something completely new that might not work at all. Or might make you look silly.

It took over six years (and a lot of encouragement from Kathy) for me to get the courage to give up the certain income that came with the travel and do what I really wanted to do.

Don't let it take you that long to try something new in your marketing.

You don't have to change everything. But pick one thing you don't think is working well and drop it for a few months and do something else instead. Stop networking, start speaking. Stop twitter, start blogging. Or vice versa.

If it works, keep doing it. If it doesn't, try something else.

Not rocket science. Obvious on paper. Trickier to do in real life. Hence the six years.

Don't you waste six years, or even six months.

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Try this to become a “follow-up machine”

Posted byIan Brodie on April 13th, 2014.

You may remember I had a bit of a rant recently about people (myself included) who use that terrible excuse of “I haven't got the time for marketing” or “I haven't got the time to learn how to do it properly”.

Well, since you're still with me I'm assuming you're one of the sensible folks who does prioritise marketing – even if it means working that bit harder for a while.

So now I'm going to give you something extra to slot into that priority time. It's pretty simple but it can get you big results.

What I want you do do is make a list of 3 people.

Not just any people. One person in each of the following criteria:

• One old contacts you did great work with but have got out of touch with
• One current contact who has the potential to become a great client or business partner for you
• One current contact who is kind of just starting out, but could get a great boost from some free help from you

Do it now. Don't wait. Just get out a pen and paper and make some notes. Should only take you a few minutes.

Now for each of the names on the list, write down something you could send them that they'd really value and find useful. I'm thinking here about articles or videos you could send a link to, maybe a book you could post to them. Or an event you could take them to.

If you don't know what it might be specifically yet, just write down the sort of thing you'd like to send them. You can search for something that fits the bill later.

Now during the next week: do that useful thing for them. Do it first thing in the morning when you get to work. One per day on any three of your working days.

Here's what you're going to learn when you do it.

Firstly, it's surprising just how many of them will really appreciate hearing from you. Especially since you'll have put a bit of thought into finding something useful to send them. This will give you a bit more confidence to contact people in the future.

Secondly, you'll be surprised at how easy it is. Just block off a few minutes of time and shoot them an email or pop something in the post. Or maybe even phone them.

Finally, you'll be pleased with the results. Out of 3 re-energised contacts during the week it's a racing certainty that at least one will do something to help you back.

See where you get to by the end of the week. If it feels like you've been able to manage it within your workload then do it again next week. And the week after.

Pretty soon you'll have become a “follow-up machine”. With results to match.

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Lost touch with old contacts and clients?

Posted byIan Brodie on April 6th, 2014.

It was probably the most uncomfortable I've ever felt sending an email.

Shouldn't have been. But it was.

I was six months in to a role in a new firm I'd been headhunted to help set up. The restrictive covenants from my previous employer had expired and I could now get back in touch with my old clients and actively pursue working with them.

But getting back in touch wasn't as easy as it sounds. It had been FAR longer than 6 months since I'd spoken to most of the people I was about to email. A couple of years in some cases.

Consulting is a project based business and each project is pretty intense. So it's difficult to peel your attention away from your current focus to do something to maintain your relationships with your other contacts.

As a result, many consultants – me included – let relationships wither and die.

Then when we need those people, instead of having an ongoing relationship, an easy way of connecting and a few deposits made in the goodwill bank; we have to call them out of nowhere and beg a favour.

Hence my churning stomach as my mouse hovered over the send button.

I really didn't want to come across as desperate or needy. Or just a “taker” who only contacted them when I wanted something. But in truth, that's exactly what I was.

An hour a week is all it takes to keep in touch with your top dozen ex-clients. Or with email marketing you can reach many many more.

Keep in touch, keep adding value and building trust and the next time you finish a project and need a new one, you'll have the right relationships to get one quickly. It took me years to learn that overcoming my laziness and finding ways to connect and be helpful would save me a ton of pain and discomfort downstream.

There are more ways of keeping in touch than ever before. Apart from phone, email and good old fashioned snail mail, you've got a bunch of social media you can connect and chat on.

The only thing holding you back is your discipline in putting aside an hour a week.

By the way, my desperate email trying to resurrect relationships did in fact lead to one new client. It'd have been way more if I'd kept in touch. But at least it shows that you shouldn't be afraid to reconnect, even if you haven't done the right thing and kept in touch.

Who can you get back in touch with today? What relationships can you rekindle that would be a real asset to you?

And how can you make nurturing a habit so you don't fall out of touch in the first place?

Think about those questions for your own business.

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Great content is not enough

Posted byIan Brodie on March 30th, 2014.

I've written before about how what you do is more important than what you say.

How – by doing good stuff for your potential clients like in a regular email newsletter – you can build relationships that turn into clients without needing to be a whiz at marketing.

Here's a mistake I made with that strategy though: focusing too much on great content.

Not that great content is a bad thing. But it's not enough.

Great content: material which educates and informs your readers, gives them useful information, helps them get results. All good stuff.

But very rational.

Dare I say it: boring.

We all say we want useful information. But after a while we stop paying attention. We can only take in so much. And it eventually feels like we're in a classroom. Zzzzzz.

What I've found over the years tends to work better is to build some emotion into your emails.

Yes, give great information. But wrap it in a story. A funny example. A rant. A dissenting point of view.

Stir some emotions.

Adrian Willmott is one of the star pupils from my Email Marketing Mastery Course. When Adrian emailed me a while back to tell me he'd just landed two big consulting projects purely through email marketing I knew I had to interview him for a podcast.

Adrian sells to finance directors in large corporates, so I wondered what he was doing to make his emails so effective. What part of the course had been the most useful for him?

You'll have to wait for the podcast for the full story, but here's one of the things I picked out. In Adrian's words:

“We put out a provocative point of view on something they should do, and then towards the end of the email we'd say ‘ask yourself, do your teams influence business decisions or are they just adding up the numbers? Are they at the table when the big decisions get made or are they stuck in their own office?' We've heard back that it's these questions that really get people's attention.”

Adrian's learnt that whether you're trying to build relationships with consumers, with small businesses or with very senior executives you shouldn't be afraid to challenge them. To say something provocative and different.

Across all walks of life, real decision makers don't just want “yes men” who repeat back to them the things they already know. They want to hear from people with different points of view who aren't afraid to state them.

You might lose some subscribers and contacts along the way. But you'll build a lot more fans and get a lot more attention.

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Hard facts slay unicorns and melt rainbows

Posted byIan Brodie on March 23rd, 2014.

A While ago when I was doing a bunch of Q&A videos and posting them up on my site someone tweeted a link to one of the videos and I got a tweet back from one of their contacts saying “Make me enter my email to watch a video – no way!”

Leaving aside that with my videos subscribing is optional, I tweeted back to ask why she objected so much.

Her answer was “asking to subscribe on first visit is so last century. I have to get to know and like you first”.

Interesting.

I'm a big believer in the importance of building credibility and trust before someone will be ready to buy from you. Does the same principle apply to subscribing to emails I wonder?

Only one way to know: check the data.

In this case, two reports from google analytics can help us.

In that month, 577 people subscribed to my emails (not including people who subscribed as part of registering for a webinar). Of those, according to the Path Length report, 64% (369) subscribed on the first page they visited on the site, 17% (101) on the second page, 7% (38) on the third page and the remaining 12% (69) on the fourth or further page.

So that tells me that the vast majority of people subscribe on the first page they visit on the site. They don't need to learn to know, like or trust me before subscribing – they do it straight away. Probably because of the offer of something useful in return.

And if I look at my Page Depth stats, it tells me that out of 12,381 visits last month, 9,051 of those visits (73%) only looked at one page.

Now my site is pretty good. Lots and lots of great, free content. Well designed. Easy to navigate.

And yet still, 73% of visits terminate after just one visit.

Sure, they might come back later (in fact, 41% of my website visitors return later that month which is better than average). But it's still a huge percentage of people who come, see one page then go.

It's not that they hate what they see. The majority of my subscribers are happy to subscribe after seeing just one page. But they've got what they wanted and head off elsewhere.

So although we might like to think that the way our website works is people fall in love with it, they keep coming back for more, we build credibility and trust, then they subscribe to our emails. The truth – as told by the data – is very different.

They come to our site. They see something they want. They subscribe (or not). They go away.

Those that have subscribed, of course, then go on to get regular emails where you can build credibility and trust over time because you're not relying on them remembering to come back.

Ideas like my twitter correspondent had that “asking people to subscribe on first visit is so last century” are very, very common. The people who hold them would like the world to work that way. Those concepts maybe apply to them and they've maybe seen one or two incidents of it happening so they extrapolate and assume it's a general rule.

But they're examples of what Hubspot's social media scientist Dan Zarrella calls “unicorns and rainbows”. Wishful thinking. You'd like it to be true so you end up believing it.

Nothing wrong with that. No harm done. Until you start recommending it to others as a course of action. Then it becomes dangerous.

Adopt the recommendation to not ask people to subscribe on their first visit and you could lose up to 73% of subscribers.

And unfortunately, far too many people – especially in the social media world – extrapolate their own preferences into assumptions about the way the world works and then present them as recommendations.

Luckily for us, hard facts slay unicorns and melt rainbows.

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Thank you Pep Guardiola

Posted byIan Brodie on March 16th, 2014.

A lot of the questions people have been sending me recently all relate to one common cause.

They manifest themselves in terms of being overwhelmed, having too many choices, not knowing what to do next.

To be honest, people like me don't always help. We constantly send you new ideas and promote different tactics. All very useful in it's place, but if you're already struggling to keep up, hearing that podcasting is the next big thing or that writing a book builds credibility or that a new web page system makes it easy for you to build your own landing pages; well, it just adds to the overwhelm.

There are two ways you can overcome this problem.

The first is to cut yourself off from the world. Unsubscribe from emails like mine, don't go on any training courses or buy any new products for a few years. Just get your head down and concentrate on getting the most from the marketing you're already doing.

I'm not kidding by the way, that isn't just an “Aunt Sally” option. I think it's a very viable and sensible one for many people. Especially those who have a tendency to be distracted.

The other approach is to do what successful football managers do.

Great managers build a side around a system they want to play, then buy the right players to play in that system. Barcelona's “Tiki-Taka” under Pep Guardiola for example.

If your system and team is geared up to play an intricate passing style, there's no point in buying a big, bustling centre forward who thrives on long balls and crosses, no matter how good he is individually. Fernando Torres never seemed to fit at Chelsea. And let's not talk about Andy Carrol at Liverpool where they bought him and then avoided playing with any wingers who could supply him with crosses.

Sure, you may adjust your system a bit to incorporate a brilliant new player. But you won't change it wholesale, and you won't buy that player unless he fits pretty well with the system.

Apply that same philosophy to your marketing.

It's great to look at new tools and approaches. But only bring on board the ones that fit well within your overall system.

Positioning yourself as a leading expert in your field? Stick to books, articles, videos and public speaking rather than jumping into Facebook Ads just because someone else has just made a killing with them.

Looking to build more “passive income”? Don't get distracted by that course on selling high value coaching programs.

And if you buy a new player, you probably need to sell one too. There's only so much room in your squad. Have a policy of adding in new tactics only if they can give you better results than existing ones you can then drop.

Keeping tight control and sticking to things which fit with your overall system is key to making sure you don't get distracted and overwhelmed by all the shiny new objects being thrown at you these days.