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Value in Advance

Posted by

Ian Brodie on October 9th, 2011.

We finished on a bit of a cliffhanger last week :)

I talked about how allowing clients to sample what you do in advance can reduce their risk – and so increase their chances of buying.

It also works to identify the highest potential clients too. Someone who makes the commitment to test you out in advance is much more likely to become a client that someone who doesn't.

So you can focus your follow-up marketing on them.

Value in Advance

There are lots of ways of doing this “Value in Advance” strategy.

The traditional approach for many consultants and coaches is the good old “free initial consultation”.

Unfortunately, because this is 1-1, it doesn't leverage your time well.

Yes, it goes “deep” and can do a lot to demonstrate your credibility and build a relationship.

But if you offer this to people “cold” as your first interaction with them, you run the risk of doing a lot of free sessions with people who aren't ideal clients or simply can't afford your services.

And in fact, many potential clients don't see this free initial consultation as the high-value session that you do. If they don't know much about you they're just as likely to worry it'll be a waste of their time or worse: you'll try to hard sell them for an hour.

My advice is to reserve your free sessions for more qualified prospects who you already know are ideally suited to be clients and have been pre-qualified in some way.

A better method is to run seminars or do presentations to small to medium sized groups. This gives you more leverage while still being able to make a strong impression on multiple people.

But, of course, it still relies on your time and physical presence.

Lead Magnets

Personally, my favourite strategy is the use of a “lead magnet”.

A lead magnet is a short report, audio CD, video, ready-reckoner, anything that helps your clients with an initial problem in an area they may later hire you in.

It's something that demonstrates your expertise and begins to build your relationship with them.

And it doesn't require you to invest your time every time a potential cllient requests one.

They can download reports, or you can get CDs easily copied and distributed for a few dollars or pounds.

Although you're not giving as much “Value in Advance” as you would be with a 1-1 session, in some ways it's a better first step for many potential clients – not quite so scary as a meeting.

And, of course, it's much more scaleable. You can reach hundreds or thousands of people without buring up all your time.

You can use lead magnets in all sorts of situations.

The obvious method is on your website as an inducement to sign up to your regular communications.

But you can also use them at networking events, for example. Instead of talking about what you do – let people sample it by giving them an audio CD of you being interviewed on a topic that would be useful to them.

All it requires is a little creative thought and any marketing method – from cold calling to doing presentations to advertising – can be enhanced by using a lead magnet.

What Do You Use?

Now, I bet this isn't the first time you've heard the lead magnet concept or something similar.

Yet few consultants and coaches use it to anywhere near it's potential.

if you're not already using a lead magnet, think about what you could produce quickly to use as one. You probably already have loads of materials you use as part of your client work that you could tweak and turn into a lead magnet.

If you already have a lead magnet – think about how you could use it more. Maybe different formats (turn a report into a video, for example). Maybe use it more ways.

But make sure you're using one.

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Marketing

Shock and Awe Marketing

Posted by

Ian Brodie on October 2nd, 2011.

Picture these two different scenarios:

Scenario 1:
You've done some great work for a client. They sing your praises to one of their peers – an ideal potential client for you – then give you a call to say they've done so and suggest you get in touch with them.

So what do you do?

Perhaps you call that potential client to set up a meeting? Maybe email them?

What does that do to the dynamic?

All of a sudden you've gone from someone they've had recommended to someone who's pushing. Someone trying to get a meeting with them. Someone trying to sell to them.

It's only a subtle shift. It's not like they now see you as some awful agressive salesperson.

But it is a shift. You've had to “draw down” on the favour bank established when your client recommended you.

And what are you going to do when you meet them? You have to figure out whether they need you, what they need, when, and you have to demonstrate to them that you know your stuff and they can trust you.

Feels a lot like a sales meeting to me. Probably does to the potential client too.

So bang, you're a vendor.

Scenario 2:
Exactly the same as above.

Except instead of calling them to set up a meeting you send them something instead.

Perhaps a CD or a video. Not a “showcase video”. Lord no, please not a “showcase video”.

But something useful. Something that would be really valuable to them. Something they would want to listen to or watch because of the intrinsic value it brings – not because you happen to be in it and you've asked them to look at it.

You know the sort of thing. You being interviewed on audio with 20 minutes of your best ideas on leadership. A video showing you creating a successful adwords campaign and describing the key elements. Your top tips on reducing overheads.

If you've written a book then, of course, that would work brilliantly. But if you haven't, then a CD or video is pretty easy to create. And can actually work just as well.

What's the dynamic like now?

Now you've deposited more into the favour bank rather than withdrawn. Now they've had something valuable from you that they feel grateful for – especially if it gives them something they can immediately do and get results from.

Now they've seen you're an expert. You know your stuff.

Now they want to call you.

Completely different ball game.

Isn't scenario 2 so much better than scenario 1?

And so much less painful when it comes to meeting them. No push. No feeling salesy.

But here's the catch. It takes work.

You've got to make that CD or video.

And you've got to nail your colours to the mast. No weasling around just saying what you think they want to hear when you meet them. No just reflecting back what they say. No BS.

You have to take a stand. You have to say what you think. You have to risk them disagreeing.

And you have to actually be good at what you do. You have to have some different ideas (for them). New insights (to them).

You don't have to be Michael Porter or Tom Peters or Seth Godin.

But you do have to say something they won't have heard time and time again before. You have to have something more than “don't work in the business, work on the business” or “work smarter not harder” or other overused crap. Clichés and obvious truisms aren't going to cut it.

It's going to take some courage. And some confidence.

But if you can take that step. Make that CD. Get it published properly (it'll be less than £100/$100 to get 50 of them done).

If you can have something that blows the socks off people before they even meet you. The full shock and awe treatment.

Well, you don't need me to tell you what a difference that's going to make to your results.

Are you going to do it?

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Marketing

3 Critical Marketing Traps for new Coaches, Consultants and Freelancers

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 28th, 2011.

I don't know about you, but when I went solo as a consultant/coach, my first few months were filled with excitement and terror in equal measure.

It was wonderful to know I could do anything I wanted and everything was dependent on me.

It was terrifying to know I could do anything I wanted and everything was dependent on me.

Your initial challenge as a solo professional is to land your first client. I was lucky: as a veteran consultant I knew enough people who sent work my way in the early days to buy me time to get fully established.

But I made mistakes too. Some big, some small. In particular, there were three things I wish someone had told me when I started.

Firstly, I wish someone had kicked my butt early on and told me if I wanted to succeed I needed to take action. It sounds obvious, and I wasn't filled with wishful thinking. But I was overly optimistic. Overly confident that something would turn up.

That overconfidence meant that I took the easy path. Concentrated on the interesting work I had rather than on the tougher task of getting out and winning new work.

Secondly, I wish someone had told me to swallow my pride. To reach out to more old contacts and tell them I was available. To hook up with as many people as I could – build my contact network quickly.

And finally, I wish someone had told me that when things started going right, when the clients and the money started flowing in, I should step up to the next level. Start working on longer term things that would make life easier. Get clients flowing in to me rather than me having to go out to get them.

Of course, things turned out very well in the end. But I could have got to where I am faster. I could have made things easier for myself.

If you want to get a headstart as a solo professional, avoid the mistakes many make in the early days, and set yourself on the fast track to success then head over and register for the free “Taking the Plunge” audio masterclass series.

There are 10 speakers (including me) giving their best advice and experience on the key areas you need to succeed as a solo or self employed professional. The topics covered include:

How to get your first paying clients (me)
How to get started as an independent consultant (Michael Zipursky, founder of Business Consulting Buzz – the leading website for business consultant)
How to “find your mojo” and turn it into a business proposition (Andrew Thorp, founder of Mojo Life)
Getting started as an independent coach (Gladeana McMahon, author and Chair of the Association for Coaching)
How to start building your business network (Heather Townsend, author of the FT Guide to Business Networking)
Getting started as a freelance trainer (Sharon Gaskin, founder of the Trainer's Training company)
Getting everything done when you're self-employed (Meg Edwards, senior coach with the David Allen company – of “Getting Things Done” fame)
How to keep on top of the admin needed to run a business (Helen Stothard, founder of HLS services, Virtual Assistants to coaches)
How to develop your business proposition (Mike Harris, author – and a guy who's built three billion dollar companies!)
How to manage the transition to self employment (Antoinette Oglethorpe, expert career coach for the self employed and organiser of the series).

I give it a huge recommendation for anyone either thinking of going solo, or in their first few years of working for themselves.

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Selling

Are Your Benefits Really Benefits?

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 26th, 2011.

I'm sure you've read many articles about the difference between Features and Benefits, and the importance of focusing on Benefits in discussions with your potential clients.

The trouble is, most of these articles are wrong.

Not completely wrong. It's just they don't go far enough.

It was brought home to me recently when I was preparing for my webinar on Tuesday with Craig Elias on Resistance Free Selling

Craig calls what I'm about to explain “setting the context” and “avoiding your clients having to do mental gymnastics”. Here's what we mean…

Normally when you learn about Features and Benefits, the explanation is that:

Features are the factual attributes of your product or service – what it does, how fast it goes, how many knobs it has, the steps in your process.
Benefits are what your clients get from those features. The results they achieve by using your services, what it means to them.

All well and good.

But here's the big question: benefits to whom?

You see, far too often we get the so-called benefits of our service by listing the features (what we do) and noting what our clients should get from them as a result.

What we fail to take into account is that these are just potential benefits. Things the client might get. Or might value.

Specific clients might not get those benefits. Let's say you're a consultant who improves the throughput and decreases the downtime of production plants. The benefit the client gets is more output from their factory.

Except that if the factory is currently running at well below capacity, increasing the capacity isn't going to give you more output.

And sometimes clients might just not value the benefit. I worked once at an airport where a fellow consultant showed them how to change their processes so they could get 1 or 2 extra flights in and out per landing bay every day. Unfortunately, as the airport was putting in planning permission to build a new terminal and citing lack of capacity as the reason why, that was certainly a benefit they didn't value at the time.

So while you can identify the potential benefits of your services in isolation, in order to know whether they're real benefits for your clients, you have to know their context. You have to know what's going on in their business.

As Craig says, you can't rely on them performing mental gymnastics to figure out whether your potential benefits will be of value to them. You have to do that thinking for or with them.

When you're marketing you need to focus in on a picture of your ideal target client, your narrow niche, to figure out what the potential benefits actually mean to them.

And when you're selling, you need to ask your potential clients questions about their situation, what problems they have, and what the impact of those issues is.Then you can see which of your potential benefits has real value in their specific situation and which to focus on discussing.

It's this transition from potential to real benefits that makes the difference between your clients seeing you as a salesperson pushing something he's not sure he wants to a trusted advisor helping him with his biggest issues.

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More Clients Memorandum

Justin Bieber’s marketing secrets

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 25th, 2011.

OK, OK, I realise Justin Bieber's not everyone's musical cup of tea – but there's a lot we can learn from how he's risen to fame.

Now I'm not talking about the marketing machine surrounding him today. I'm talking about how he started out.

He recorded videos of himself performing and posted them on youtube. He built a fan base by giving his “target clients” a sample of what he could do. Eventually his manager spotted him and it took off from there.

It's what Amazon do too with the Kindle. Rather than making you buy a book sight unseen, you get to download a couple of free chapters first to see if you like it.

All the best selling iPhone apps do the same. The free version of Angry Birds has been downloaded over 2 billion times – triggering hundreds of millions of dollars of sales for the business.

But it's not just an internet age phenomenon. Retail stores like Costco have been giving free samples of their food away for decades to shoppers as they browse the store.

Using free samples works partly because of reciprocation – you got something for free so you feel obliged to give something back.

But it mainly works because it reduces risk. You get to experience what you're considering buying to see if it's any good – whether it works for you.

In the world of consulting and coaching there are far too many “best kept secrets”. Far too many brilliant coaches or genius consultants who scrabble around for work.

And one of the key reasons is that no one knows how good they are.

They don't allow people to sample their work before they buy. They don't want to “give away the store”.

But from a client's perspective, it means that hiring them is a big risk. They don't know exactly what they'll be getting. And they don't look any different to all the other coaches and consultants who say they're great too.

So how do you “do a Bieber”? How do you allow your potential fans to sample what you do before they buy?

You've got a week to think it over!

In next Sunday's email I'll be sharing some successful and less successful models for how consultants and coaches can do this.

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More Clients Memorandum

Revealed: my top 3 performing emails

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 18th, 2011.

Being a bit geeky, one of the things I like to do is analyse data. And one analysis I often return to is effective email subject lines.

Now the ultimate measure of the performance of an email is how much new business I get as a result of my emails. But that can be tricky to track down to individual emails.

And in truth, the effect of the emails is culmulative rather than one email suddenly causing someone to pick up the phone and hire me or buy a product.

So what I often analyse is email open rates. What percentage of people who receive each email actually open it. So it's a measure of the performance of the email subject line rather than the email as a whole.

If I look at the emails you've been getting every Sunday from me there are some pretty interesting results that may help you when you're trying to write emails to get them opened by your potential clients.

Generally speaking, email open rates go down over time.

The first time I email someone after they sign up for my newsletter there's a high chance they'll open it and read it. Over time, people's interests and priorities change so the open rates go down.

What I looked for was email subject lines that “bucked the trend”. That got significantly higher opens that the email that preceded them.

Here are my three best performing subject lines using this criteria:

“5 crippling beliefs that keep consultants and coaches in the poor house”

“How to escape marketing overwhelm”

“Business Development romance in practice”

Why did they perform so well?

The first two are obvious, I think.

The first promises to reveal some information on “crippling beliefs” likely to “keep you in the poor house” if you hold them. The language is strong, and the benefit is clear: avoid these beliefs to avoid ending up poor.

The second promises to show you how to avoid a problem I believe a large number of professionals suffer from: being overwhelmed with their marketing. It's likely to hit a raw nerve with many people and again, the word “overwhelm” is a strong one.

The third one is a bit of a puzzle. It doesn't quite fit into the pattern of promising a strong benefit.

My belief is that the high open rate is driven by curiosity. People wondering what on earth “business development romance” actually is.

So three quite different types of subject line. One on avoiding potential pain people could be worried about. One on alleviating pain they could well be already feeling. And one arousing their curiosity.

When you come to write your own emails, see if you can work some of those themes into your subject lines.

And feel free to “steal” my subject lines too and tweak them for your own use. The “5 crippling beliefs” one was actually adapted from a headline on a Copyblogger blog post.

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Strategy

Build Trust and Credibility Before You Ever Meet People

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 9th, 2011.

I had a strange experience earlier this week.

A potential client dropped me an email and set up a time to talk. I followed my usual process and asked him to drop me a note with various details about his business and the key challenges he was facing.

When he called, the first thing he said was:

“It's funny, I've seen you so many times on video and heard you on webinars, it feels like I'm talking to an old friend”.

How great is that? We've never met or even spoken, yet the feeling he's getting as we start to speak is one of friendship.

Getting people to know, like and trust you has been a staple of business development for service businesses for as long as I care to remember.

The problem, of course, is that everyone does it.

In the competitive race, once the starter pistol goes, we all rush to build our credibility with potential clients and get them to like and trust us enough so that they're ready to buy. The one who inches over the finish line first wins.

But what if you began with a headstart? What if before the starter pistol fired, you were 50 yards down the track? Half way to your potential client knowing, liking and trusting you enough to hire you. So far ahead that your competitors will only have just got started by the time the client feels comfortable enough to buy from you.

That's the power of audio and visual media.

You can build credibility with the written word. But for that “know, like and trust” factor that we need if they're going to hire us for a complex and costly service – they need to see and hear us in action.

Podcasts, webinars, video on your website aren't going to get you all the way there – but they're going to give you a critical headstart vs your competitor.

If you use them, of course.

Do you?

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More Clients Memorandum

Do something different

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 4th, 2011.

I did some training a while back for a really good client. And something we did had quite a surprising result that I think we all can learn from.

The area we were focusing on was tenders/RFPs and we used a live example of a proposal they were about to work on to bring the training course to life.

The team did a great job and came up with a theme and approach to the proposal that really hit their customer's hot buttons while highlighting their strengths.

At the end of the course, one of the participants made an excellent point…

“You know, we normally would have just ‘gone through the motions' with that proposal and not come up with half the ideas we ended up including”.

It wasn't that we did anything particularly unusual.

We just analysed their customer's request a bit more deeply and used a couple of frameworks I'd developed for them to draw out what was really driving their needs, and what fears they might have about switching suppliers.

What was important was that we tried something different.

We looked at something they'd essentially looked at a hundred times before – but just with a different lens.

And it made a big difference.

Try it the next time you're working on your marketing.

Look at what you're working on through your customer's eyes. Or your competitors'.

Instead of focusing on problems, focus on aspirations – or vice versa.

Instead of your normal benefit-filled headlines – write copy to invoke curiosity or surprise this time.

Do something different. It can work as well for you as it did for me.

Speak soon,

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More Clients Memorandum

How to market like a professional poker player

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 28th, 2011.

About a decade or so ago I got a bit obsessed with poker.

For an ex-mathematician like me who then went on to study business and psychology, it's an alluring game. Full of analogies and parallels with business and marketing.

Although I haven't played for years, I still have a huge library of poker literature in storage. Brunson, Sklansky, Malmuth, Caro, Schoonmaker, dozens of them.

And I'm still sometimes reminded of the similarities between poker and business. Here's one that struck me recently.

Stacking the Odds in Your Favour

Perhaps the biggest difference between poker professionals and casual players – the thing that most results in one group winning money and the other losing it – is simply that the pros play less hands.

In the most popular form of poker, hold-em, there's a saying that “any two cards can win”. And while that may be true in exceptions, following that advice and regularly playing any two cards is a surefire route to the poor-house.

Instead, the pros stack the odds in their favour by only playing the best starting hands. They sit out round after round and only invest their precious chips in starting hands they know have a positive expected value (ie. if played often enough, they'll make money).

It's not a particularly clever strategy. It's not a particularly exciting one. But it works. It's the foundation they then build on.

Now, if you were to watch poker on TV it wouldn't seem that way. Every pro mixes up their game and plays cards you wouldn't expect so that they don't become predictable. And inevitably the TV shows focus on those unusual hands, or hands where a big bluff comes off or someone gets lucky on the river.

But underneath all the fireworks, and the table talk, the pros know the odds and they play them.

Similarly, in marketing, one thing that separates successful rainmakers from those who struggle is they stack the odds in their favour by focusing on prospects with a high chance of becoming clients.

It sounds obvious. But so few people do it.

They don't have a clear picture in their mind of exactly the sort of person likely to need their services.

They go to networking events filled with people unlikely to ever become a client or to refer one.

They advertise in general media or Yellow Pages.

Their website offers nothing of value or interest to the people who would make the best clients for them.

When they ask for referrals, they say they'd be happy to get a referral to “anyone” or “small businesses”. Such broad definitions that they don't get referred to anyone (or worse still they get referred to people never likely to buy from them and so waste their time).

If you want to be successful and productive with your marketing you must invest your time and effort like professional poker players invest their chips: only in the very highest potential areas.

For most of us, our time is a super-scarce resource. Yet so often we use marketing approaches that cause us to spend valuable face-to-face time with people who aren't perfect prospects for us.

The result is not only wasted time for us – it's also a painful experience for both sides.

Don't be like the poker amateurs who play any two cards and throw away their chips night after night.

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Selling

It Ain’t What You Do…It’s Who You Do It With

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 25th, 2011.

Wrong People Quite a bit of the training and coaching work I do is to help professionals improve their selling skills to close more business.

It's an area where many people feel unfomfortable – they don't want to be too pushy or “salesy”.

And there are indeed techniques and approaches which can improve your conversion rate by improving the way you interact with potential clients in sales meetings.

But often there's something else you can do. Something that can have an even bigger impact than any sales technique.

Let's do a little exercise.

Think about the very best ever sales meeting you’ve had. A meeting with a potential client that was incredibly pleasant, where you felt really engaged, and where the client emerged enthusiastic and signed up to work with you right away.

Visualise it now.

Now rather than thinking about what you did in that meeting, I want you to think about the characteristics of the client you were meeting with. What was it about them that made the meeting go so well?

Chances are, they had most of the following factors:

They had a genuine problem or issue that you could help with
The issue was important to them – it had a big impact
You could add a tremendous amount of value to them
They were able to easily afford your services
They respected your expertise – they saw you as an authority in your field
They trusted you – they weren’t second guessing what you were saying and your motives
You got on well – your personalities and communication styles clicked

Let’s call these types of people your high potential prospects.

Here’s one of the big secrets to having more successful sales meetings.

Your success at winning clients is less to do with what you do in your sales meetings and much more to do with having the meeting with the right person.

If you can sit down with a high potential prospect: someone who has a genuine need for what it is you do, who feels the urgency of that need, who trusts in you and believes in your capabilities – then you are very likely to get a sale.

Conversely, if you meet with people who don’t have an urgent need, or who don’t perceive you to be an expert at what you do – then no matter what clever sales techniques you might use, you’re going to struggle to sell. It’s going to be painful.

Now, if you're a huge company – IBM, say – then you don't have much choice. You pretty much need to sell to everyone to keep up your market share and revenues.

But for most of us, that's not the case. Most of us only need a handful of good clients every year to do very well indeed.

We have a choice. We don't have to try to sell to everyone.

One of the characteristics of a consultant or coach with an inadequate marketing system in place is that they have very few high quality leads, and spend a lot of painful time trying to sell to the few they do have. Most of whom aren't anywhere near the high potential prospects we thought about earlier.

With a strong marketing system, the people you're meeting are a good fit to that high potential prospect profile. They're a pleasure to meet with and talk to, and they're much, much easier to sell to.

So next time you lose a sale, or are considering doing something to improve your selling skills, take a step back.

Is the issue really your selling skills?

Think about your most recent sales meetings. Have the people across the other side of the table looked like those high potential prospects you visualised earlier?

If they haven't, then chances are the issue is really your marketing system.

Chances are you're just not selling to the right people.

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