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

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 :)