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The Importance of Authenticity

Posted by

Ian Brodie on October 21st, 2009.

Pointing to the Truth A few months ago I had a bit of a heated email argument with a fairly well-known marketing guru whose newsletter I subscribed to.

I won't mention names as the point of this post isn't about criticising others – it's about something I believe to be vital to succeed in business development: authenticity.

The argument started when I received an email from the guru sent from a hospital waiting room in a few moments he had spare waiting for his wife to give birth. His email said he had to be quick (for obvious reasons) but wanted to make an offer on one of his new products.

Nothing wrong with that, per se. In fact I believe it's good thing to share insights into your personal life with your community. It deepens your relationships – rather like the way you'd share personal information, ideas and hopes with a close business partner or one of your best clients. Your very best business relationships go beyond purely business.

The problem was that I received the same email 3 times over a 3 month period.

I emailed the guy, and he said he'd had a problem with his email system. OK, fair enough. No one has perfect grasp of their technology. I'm prepared to believe it was a genuine mistake that multiple copies were sent out.

But then I noticed that the emails were actually all a little different. They had slightly different headlines.

In other words, he'd been split testing the headlines.

Now split testing headlines is a good marketing practice in normal circumstances. But when your email is supposed to be something you rattled out quickly when in a hospital waiting room it actually leaves a rather nasty taste in the mouth.

Far from being the spur of the moment message it purported to be, this was a calculated marketing tactic. And it left me feeling manipulated.

Here's the deal: had this been a normal marketing email then, of course I'd have been perfectly cool with headlines or anything else being tested, optimised or whatever. Why shouldn't the marketer try to maximise the response they get?

But this was an email that purported to be a spur of the moment outpouring. His email personalised things – brought me into his world. It made me feel closer, as if I was sharing his experience.

For me then to discover that the email had been a calculated construction left me feeling used.

And that's the thing. The most powerful marketing & sales approaches are the ones that bring us closer to our clients, that deepen our relationships.

But they must be genuine.

Deepening a relationship can't be one-sided. You can't pretend to open up to someone, but really put a tight filter on what you say. You can't encourage a client to be frank and honest with you if you're not going to be frank and honest with them.

If you do try to manipulate, you'll be found out. It may not be as obvious as a split-test headline on a supposedly personal message: but people will discover your manipulation.

If you can't be genuine – then stick to more impersonal forms of business development: advertising, factual messages, value propositions.

But if you want to build deep. long lasting relationships with clients, you must, must be authentic.

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News

Lead Nurturing – Latest Issue of Outside In Newsletter Published

Posted by

Ian Brodie on October 8th, 2009.

Back in September 2009 I published an edition of my newsletter focused on Lead Nurturing: how you progress an initial client relationship over time to a point where you're actually doing business together.

Lead nurturing is critical for professionals: at the point at which we initially meet clients very few of them need our services right now. But almost all of them will need our type of service in the next few years. To be the one they remember and choose at that point, we need to nurture our relationships with those potential clients over time.

The article gives a number of hints and tips to enable you to do that relationship-building better, and with more clients.

The newsletter also includes a short article on the importance of doing and learning from “win reviews” rather than the traditional “loss reviews”.

You can read the articles in the archive by clicking here.

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Marketing

Is the Free Initial Consultation Dead?

Posted by

Ian Brodie on October 7th, 2009.

Yes, in my view.

At least in the way it's normally done.

For many years, consultants, coaches, trainers – and even accountants and lawyers – have been offering “free initial consultations” as a way of encouraging clients to engage with them.

The logic, of course, is that once they work with them for an hour or so, their fears about whether the professional knew their stuff and whether they'd be able to get on with them would be laid to rest.

Some of the more marketing savvy professionals learnt how to focus the initial consultation on identifying the client's most urgent problems and plotting an outline action plan rather than simply giving away an hour's free work. In that way the client was taken on a journey where they realised just how big their issues were and were more inclined to buy as a result.

But in my experience, potential clients are becoming less and less likely to take up the offer of free initial consultations.

The change is coming from two angles:

Firstly, they've experienced some professionals using the initial consultation as a blatant opportunity to sell to them. They now view initial consultations as risky – with a high chance they'll be subjected to a sales pitch and receive little value from the session.
Secondly, they've discovered that they can achieve many of the things they got from an initial consultation in other ways (for free too) without having to engage with a professional. Meeting a consultant, lawyer or other professional can be a daunting prospect. So if they believe they can get similar value from a free e-book or video or seminar recording – then they'll often prefer to take that option. And they can take this option at their own convenience – without having to travel or wait until the professional is available.

My advice:

Most professionals benefit greatly from having some form of free give-away which gets a client to begin to engage with them. It can demonstrate their expertise, give clues as to what they're like to work with, and generally reduce the client's perceived risk.

But the day when free initial consultations worked well for this are gone. If all you have as a freebie is a free consultation you need to think again, and create something else you can offer as an easier to bite option.

It could be that after sampling your free report or teleseminar, the potential client is ready for a free consultation (or they may be ready to buy straight away). But it's unlikely that today's time-pressed cynical executives will jump at the chance of a free consultation if nothing has come before it to demonstrate your capabilities and personality.

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Marketing

Win New Clients with Talks and Seminars

Posted by

Ian Brodie on October 1st, 2009.

Talks and Seminars The key to marketing professional services is to demonstrate rather than claim.

And if you're marketing yourself and your skills then one of the strongest ways to do this is through talks and seminars.

Clients hire professionals who understand their problems, have the expertise to solve them, and who they feel they could work with productively. Few other marketing approaches give the professional such an opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of client problems and their expertise, and give a feel for what they would be like to work with.

Talks and seminars are in the top tier of effective marketing approaches.

I remember the first time I saw a consultant give a talk on marketing at a networking event many years ago. The talk was pretty bland. Nothing special or new. But the consultant had a queue of people wanting to talk to them at the end. It didn't take me long to figure out that this could be a great way of engaging with new clients.

So how do you go about getting speaking engagements & seminars?

It's something I asked myself as I was planning my marketing priorities for 2009. I wanted to grow my practice locally (historically, the vast majority of my work has been international, or London based and I wanted to cut down on travel somewhat). Talks and seminars seemed an obvious route to go down.

I followed a simple three point plan which can work for many other professionals too. I'm focusing here on speaking for free in order to market your services, rather than paid speaking engagements.

Step 1: Get Good

An absolute prerequisite to marketing your professional firm through talks & seminars is that you must be very good at presenting your material.

That means both good content, and a good presentation style.

It sounds obvious: but so many professionals overlook it. The number of mediocre and sometimes very bad presentations I've been to in the last year is simply staggering. A bad presentation does more harm than good. Yet so many people fail to prepare, fail to practice, fail to get feedback – and so fail to get any new clients.

In my case, I'm a fairly experienced presenter, having done sessions at events from local seminars to global conferences. And I've been professionally trained in presentation techniques. But I still felt I needed to make sure I made a great impact, so I decided to make an investment in my capabilities in this area.

Early on, I focused on being able to really “ace” just one talk (on getting more referrals). So I developed it, practiced it, got feedback on it, and did it at multiple events in a variety of formats.

I also joined a local Toastmasters group to work on my presentations skills, and hooked up with my local Professional Speakers Association (in the US, this is the National Speakers Association) to learn from watching really polished performers in action. I also took coaching on developing compelling presentations. And, of course, I read a ton of high quality material on the subject.

Even if you're an experienced speaker or seminar presenter, you can almost always improve. And at bare minimum, you need to make sure that the presentations and seminars you do showcase you at the top of your game. Make sure you prepare them well (please, no endless stream of bullet-point PowerPoint slides), you practice and rehearse, and that you get honest feedback from experienced presenters.

I thoroughly recommend joining Toastmasters. If you don't know it already, it's not about becoming one of those guys who loudly announces the guests at functions – it's about becoming a great speaker. The most valuable element of Toastmasters is that you get to practice in a safe environment and get constructive feedback. And because you go back regularly rather than it being a one-off training course, you learn via the optimal method for skills training: one thing at a time not a whole bunch of new ideas heaped on you.

Step 2: Get a Plan

I'd wanted to get more involved in speaking & seminars right from when I set up my own practice. But for a year it just didn't happen.

The reason: wanting and wishing aren't the same as planning and doing.

But once I'd set myself a target of 12 presentations/seminars to audiences with at least 10 or more potential clients I was spurred into to action. I broke down the target into months and planned the activities I needed to do to hit that target. I brainstormed potential events & venues, thought through the topics I would focus on that would be likely to lead to potential clients engaging with me, and identified the resources I would need to achieve my goal.

Once I had my plan in place, I became more aware of possibilities for offering my services as a presenter. And by reviewing the plan and progress initially weekly and then monthly, I kept the pressure on myself to hit the target.

And it worked. I've already beaten my target 9 months in.

Simple stuff. But I hadn't done it the year before, because I hadn't taken the simple step of setting a target and making a plan.

Step 3: Get Booked

For me, there were three key steps which got me the opportunities to speak I needed.

The first step was to clarify with laser focus just what sort of events and audiences I needed to speak in front of. Obviously I wanted to get in front of potential clients and referrers. But the key was being able to articulate this clearly so that I could identify potential events and forums myself, and that I could explain it to others so that they knew what I was looking for.

Here, it helps to be focused. If you specialise in working with a particular sector or client type, or working on a specific set of issues or functional area then there are often professional associations or groups similarly specialised. And they're pretty much always on the lookout for good speakers with interesting topics.

If you're less specialised there are theoretically more potential groups to speak to: networking events, chambers of commerce, etc. But there are also more people offering to speak at those events.

The second step was to have done my preparation. I knew the topic I wanted to speak about, and it was one of great interest to my potential audience. I prepared a clear summary of the topic so that when I spoke to potential event hosts, they could see I had something of value ready. It's infinitely more credible than the tactic many people use of “I'd like to speak at your event. Any subject really, just tell me what you want me to talk about.”

And having a lot of publicly available material available on my blog helped. Potential hosts could quickly see I knew what I was talking about.

The third step was to go for an easy win and then leverage it. I managed to get a recommendation from someone who knew me well to an event host they knew well too. It was enough to get started and I made sure I did an excellent job at that first talk. From then on being able to say “I've just presented on abc to the xyz group…” gave me much more credibility in getting booked for other events.

Once I had a handful of talks under my belt, I was able to expand the range of subjects I covered too.

Now it's Your Turn

My plan worked, and it worked quickly. And I managed it as a sole practitioner without admin support. As a professional in a bigger practice you should certainly be able to harness the skills of your marketing/business development team to help you both with the material and in getting events booked.

You may even be able to host some events yourself. However, I do advise that unless you already have a big, responsive contact list it's much easier to get a good attendance by presenting or running a seminar at a well established event or forum.

Remember: the key to making it happen was to set a target and build a plan. Everything flowed from there.

Set your own target. Build your own plan. And it will flow for you too.

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Selling

Selling With Stories: Answering Tough Questions

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 8th, 2009.

18 months ago I posted a very popular article on Selling With Stories where I described how stories and anecdotes can be used to great effect by professionals to provide more meaningful, resonant descriptions of what we do and how we work.

Stories are also particularly effective when we're asked those tricky questions that clients like to throw at us when we're pitching for business.

Faced with “what would you do if…” and “how would you handle…” questions, there's a great temptation for professionals to try to demonstrate their expertise by trotting out management, legal, accounting or other theory for how situations should be handled.

But that's not what clients actually want to hear. They want the confidence that you have handled these situations and that you will be able to deal with them in practice, not in theory.

The best way to handle these questions is with a short story or anecdote about a client situation where you faced such an issue and were able to address it.

When I sold and delivered large consulting change management programmes, I had a series of stories about overcoming resistance, stories about programme management, stories about delivering results and stories about culture change. Each of these gave me credibility when a client asked how we could address the organisational obstacles to change, or how we could make sure they really achieved the benefits they were looking for from the programme, etc.

Some stories are reusable for multiple situations. One of my overcoming resistance stories about a senior executive in a client organisation who had been overlooked for the CEO role and initially wanted to obstruct any initiative launched by the CEO also doubled as a story about how to address executive politics.

Sometimes the story doesn't even have to be of a great success to be effective. About 5 years ago I won a rather nice multi-million Euro sales process implementation project for the consulting firm I was working for. We'd had a tricky relationship with the client and found out later we were in last place coming up to our final presentation. The turning point came when the senior client executive told us that all previous sales process projects he'd known had failed because the consultants hadn't engaged with the front-line staff. I was able to tell a story about how I'd learned the hard way in a previous project where we hadn't involved the key salespeople and first line managers early enough and so had struggled with implementation until we eventually got them on board. It wasn't a story about a great success we'd had – but it told the executive that I'd been in that situation before and I wasn't going to make the same mistake again. We won the project, and in a debrief meeting later the client told us that had been the key moment when they knew we had the right practical experience to work with them.

These “early lessons” stories can be even more effective than success stories as they're highly believable, don't come across as pompous or “show offy”, and really send a clear message that because of that hard lesson you've known what to do right ever since.

Of course, the “early lesson” type story has to be set a decent distance in the past – it can't be a mistake you made the previous week!

Most professionals should be able to create a list of tricky questions they often get asked and prepare example stories to address them. They're best not replayed verbatim as stock answers, but stored away as an easy-to-recall memory to build on.

And using stories to answer tough questions is not only more believable – it's much more interesting than a dry theoretical answer too.

Featured

Mindset

Are you Dr House or Dr Kildare?

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 4th, 2009.

I love House.

I think we all like to empathise with the outsider, the maverick, the tormented genius.

And in our professional lives, many of us secretly long to be able to play that role – at least sometimes. To be able to just use our huge brains to solve clients' problems without having to deal with the complex, messy emotional issues. To not have to deal with feelings & relationships. To just get on and do our job. “If only we didn't have to deal with clients…”

Often we label this emotional side of the job as “politics” – when in reality it's just dealing with people.

Of course, Gregory House doesn't put up with all that. He avoids seeing patients – because they all lie about their symptoms anyway. He uses cold, hard facts to make his diagnosis.

And he always gets it right.

It's a very seductive image. Dangerously so – because the real world just doesn't work like that.

For accountants, consultants, lawyers and other professionals; how we interact and deal with people has a huge impact on our success – that's hardly new news.

When we're selling our services, we#ve always known that at least to some degree, clients decide emotionally and justify rationally.

But often we castigate them for that – how foolish of them not to pick the “right person for the job” just because they didn't get on with them, or they didn't have great interpersonal skills.

But the idea that somehow the highly technically competent person with no social skills is the right person and has been unlucky in not being hired is just pure fantasy.

In reality, it takes great social skills to truly succeed in performing professional roles: Dr Kildare's bedside manner not Dr House's.

In the world of consultants and others who focus on organisational improvement there's a phrase that's as true today as when I first heard it nearly 20 years ago.

A B grade plan with an A grade implementation is infinitely better than an A grade plan with a B grade implementation.

Organisations only change and improve to the degree which their people change and improve. The greatest ideas and plans in the world are no good if you don't have the people skills to get them implemented.

So in fact, the “foolish client” who based a lot of their hriring decision on which consultant they got on well with and they felt would “connect” with their people actually made a highly rational decision. They hired the person most likely to successfully implement change in their organisation. The technocrat with poor people skills would have had great ideas and produced a great report – but that report would be left on the shelf unimplemented.

Or take an architect. If they can't connect with their clients, they can't find out what they're really looking for. They won't be able to get behind “I'll know it when I see it” to a deep understanding of what would really delight their client.

Even lawyers and accountant need their clients to open up to them, to share with them what they're really looking for. They need to understand how they really feel and to get real feedback on their performance in order to do a great job.

In the real world, it's Dr Kildare not Dr House who gets the best result.

The learning for business development?

Often, the skills you need to attract and win new clients are actually the skills that will make you a great professional. Don't view them as two different worlds.

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Selling

Want to Sell More? Have Something Better to Sell.

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 14th, 2009.

I spend the majority of my time helping my clients get better at marketing & selling their services. We look at marketing strategies, lead generation techniques, sales processes and skills. The “how” of business development, if you like.

So sometimes it's easy to forget the “what”. The stuff you're actually selling. And the fact that the most important thing is to have really great services to sell.

Not only that, but we need to have a range of services too – and they need to be configured and positioned in meaningful terms for our clients.

It's a problem particularly prevalent amongst consultants, coaches and trainers. Our “product” is so flexible and configurable that we tend to only describe one generic service: we'll “figure out what your problems are and fix 'em”.

Unfortunately, we often assume too much. We're experts in our capabilities: we know how much they can be tailored, how we can tweak them to exactly meet our clients' needs. Our clients however, aren't so expert. They often can't tell whether we can help them with their problems and opportunities or not.

What we usually do is bang away trying to sell the same generic service using multiple, different marketing & sales approaches. What we should be doing is changing what we're offering. Getting more specific. Figuring out the different benefits that could be achieved and packaging up a service for each one.

Next time you're reviewing your marketing & sales approaches, consider whether your time might not be better spent reviewing your services instead and better matching them to what your clients really want.

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Marketing

10 Linkedin Tips for Professionals

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 1st, 2009.

Linkedin Tips For Building Your Professional Presence And Getting More Clients

My latest tips on building a Client Winning Profile for Linkedin are now on a free, short video – click here to watch it.

Linkedin is the “social network for business” and now has over 200 million users.

And many Linkedin users, myself included, have found new clients through it, and enhanced relationships with existing clients. But many others have found it to suck up a ton of time for very little gain. So here are 10 quick tips for getting the most from Linkedin.

1. Make your profile client focused

The first thing you do when you join Linkedin is to create a profile. And since Linkedin has slots for your previous job roles, qualifications, etc. there’s an almost overwhelming temptation to make your profile look like your CV.

Resist that temptation.

When you first meet potential clients you don’t rattle off a huge list of companies you’ve worked for and the responsibilities you’ve had – that would bore the pants off them. So don't do the same on Linkedin.

Most effective introductions focus on who you help, and what problems you help them solve or results you help them achieve. Then if asked more, you say a bit more about what you do – perhaps giving a little backstory as to why you are uniquely qualified to help, or an example of the work you do.

Linkedin is for making connections – and for the majority of professionals that means clients and business partners, not recruiters.

You need to design your profile to have the impact you want on those connections. Treat it like your introduction at a networking meeting.

Think about the impression you want to make on your potential clients. What will get them interested enough to read your profile? Probably something telling them you work with people just like them and deal with the sort of challenges they have.

What will make them read on? Probably some interesting examples that spell out and “prove” the results they could get by working with you.

What would make them contact you? Well, at minimum a call to action with details of how – a website, phone number or email address.

Whatever you do, don't just stick your CV details in there.

2. Get connecting – but…

Linkedin works on connections. The most powerful use of Linkedin is to find new clients and business partners through the search function or directly via your contacts' connections. The more direct connections you have, the more opportunities you have to connect. I still see people who’ve made all the effort to set up their Linkedin profile – but who have so few connections that they don’t get any benefit.

The Linkedin toolbar for Outlook provides an easy way of inviting the your Outlook contacts and people you email regularly to connect with you.

However, there’s a catch…

3…Choose your connection strategy carefully

There are two very different strategies to connecting on Linkedin: “Open Networking” and “Trusted Partner Networking”.

In business networking generally, the value you get from your network is a product of the size of your network, and your ability to “convert” connections into productive business (work, a referral, etc.). You can grow the value of your network by getting more connections, or deepening the strength of each connection (getting to know people better, helping them out, etc.)

On Linkedin, one strategy for getting value is to be an “Open Networker” or LION (LinkedIn Open Networker). Open Networkers focus on growing the size of their network by initiating and accepting connection requests from as many people as possible. Open Networkers typically have many thousands of connections. This means that when they search for useful relationships (potential clients or business partners), for example looking for contacts in specific companies, or geographies or with specific interests or job titles – they are much more likely to find them (exponentially more likely because of the way Linkedin connections work).

The downside of this strategy is that with thousands of connections they don’t know many of them particularly well, if at all. They’re essentially using Linkedin as a giant Rolodex or telephone directory rather than as a way of making deeper connections. That’s neither good nor bad – it just means that if they find someone they want to connect with through one of these “shallow” connections, they’re unlikely to get a strong referral to them – they'll still have to initiate a relatively cold contact.

The other strategy is to have fewer but deeper connections – a “Trusted Partner” strategy. Here you only connect to people you already know and trust. Most likely from face-to-face interaction, but possibly from online interaction too.

With this strategy you have less chance of finding someone via a search because you have less connections. But if you do find someone, it'll be through someone who knows and trusts you – and they'll be able to give a strong referral to you and put you in touch with the person you’re interested in connecting with.

The downside to the “Trusted Partner” strategy is that it’s a bit like going to a face to face networking event and only speaking to the people you already know. You deepen your relationship with them – but you don’t build any new relationships.

Personally, I take a “middle way” and I recommend you do the same.

I don’t actively go out and connect with huge numbers of people. But if someone wants to connect with me, and their profile looks interesting – then I’m very happy to connect with them, even if I don’t know them. If they do turn out to be a “spammer” (I’ve only had this happen once with over 1,000 connections) then I can always disconnect.

This way, my network expands significantly. I meet new people who may turn out to be helpful to me, and I may be helpful to them.

I always try to take the time when people connect with me to send them a message to start a conversation rather than just accept the connection but never speak to them. That way we find out more about each other and it may lead to interesting and valuable discussions. At minimum, it means that if I want to ask a favour later, we'll actually have interacted before.

4. Use Search to find potential clients and business partners

This is perhaps the most important of my Linkedin Tips.

Many people get going on Linkedin but fail to use it to help their business. Absolutely the most effective way I've found to gain business value from Linkedin is to find potential clients and business partners. One of the things I do in my consulting practice is to help clients get more referrals for their business. And one of the key things I teach them is to be very specific in who they ask to be referred to.

Linkedin allows the ultimate in specificity. You can search for exactly who you want to be referred to – by company, by geography, by name, by job title, etc. And you can search across your entire network at once. Or you can look at the contact list of an individual to see if there’s anyone you’d like to be connected to.

Almost everyone I've taught to do this has been staggered by just how many people their contacts know that they'd love an introduction to. Yet before using Linkedin they had no idea that they were connected.

Once you’ve identified people you’d like to be introduced or referred to, rather than try to connect them directly, give your mutual connection a call and ask them if they can connect you. That’s much more polite than going directly, and it’s much more likely to be successful.

5. Give recommendations and endorsements to get them

Recommendations are very helpful to have on your profile. They’re a clear indication of the quality of your work and the relationships you form.

But begging for a recommendation isn’t a great strategy.

If you want to get recommendations, use Linkedin to give them to people you’ve worked with and who have done a great job for you. Linkedin will show them the recommendation to approve, then ask them if they want to reciprocate. They probably will.

Similarly with the new Endorsement feature, if you endorse someone, they'll be notified and you're likely to get a reciprocal endorsement in return. if you get an impressive number of endorsements you can move them up in your profile to just under your summary. So the first thing people see after finding about about you is that lots of people think you're great.

6. Have a helpful Professional Headline

Another one of my most impactful Linkedin Tips. When people find you in searches on Linkedin, the initial thing they see is a little box with your name, photo, and your “professional headline”.What most people have in their headline is their job title. “Owner at XYZ Company” or “Principal consultant at ABC Ltd”. By default, unless you change it manually, Linkedin takes the headline from your last job title.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t give people a clue as to whether you might be able to help them, or might be interesting to connect to.

You should treat your headline like your introduction when networking. Focus on what you can do to help people.

My headline, for example is “Straight talking advice for Consultants and Coaches to help them Attract Clients and Win More Business”. It’s much more useful in telling people what I actually do than using an “official” job title like Managing Director. That will get more people to click through to my profile and maybe begin to interact with me.

You can edit your Headline via the Edit My Profile option.

7. Join Linkedin Groups to connect and interact (but be careful)

Linkedin groups are essentially discussion forums for specific interest groups. They allow you to find out the latest news, and to join in debates on topics of interest. You can join groups both of interest to you professionally, and the groups where your potential clients “hang out”.

Some people have reported great success in meeting potential clients and building their credibility by being helpful and answering questions on Linkedin Groups. But be careful. My own experience is that far more people end up wasting hours of time in fairly idle chatter, or in trying to sound clever but with very little impact.

Before you join a group, click on the link to check out the group statistics and look at the activity stats. What you want to see is a lot more comments than discussions started every week. Lots of comments means members are actively engaging with each other. Lots of discussions with few comments means people are just posting their stuff and no one is reading or engaging with it.

8. Use Status Updates to subtly remind your contacts of what you do

Linkedin status updates are a nice way of helping to stay top of mind with contacts. If you were to call or email all your contacts any time you did something small but interesting, it would quickly become seen as pushy or spammy. But updating your status is an non-intrusive way of getting a gentle reminder out.

Depending on their settings, your contacts will get a regular email with a summary of the status updates of their contacts. And they will see the updates on their Linkedin homepage. Mostly it will just be “so and so updated their profile” type messages. So if your status update has something interesting in it (“Ian has just run a seminar on consultative selling skills”) it will remind them of the sort of thing you do and may even trigger them into action.

Recently, for example, I put up a status update saying I’d run a training course on Marketing for Consultants for the Institute of Business Consulting. That prompted one of my old colleagues to get back in touch and we came to an arrangement about sharing training material.

You can also share your latest blog post and other useful resources. Be careful through: Linkedin isn't Twitter and your connections won't appreciate you making dozens of updates a day as it will mean they can't won't anything from their other contacts.

9. Watch others’ status updates to initiate contact

Keep an eye on status updates from others – it can be a good opportunity to get back in touch – especially if they’ve changed jobs or have set out on a new venture. Even small status changes can help give you something to start a conversation – the sort of smalltalk needed to keep dialogues and relationships going in between more meaty topics.

These days many CRM systems like Salesforce and Highrise offer “Social CRM” features. They make it easy to find your contacts on Linkedin (and Facebook and Twitter) and track their activity on their profile page on the CRM.

10. Keep your use of Linkedin in balance

This is less a tip about using Linkedin, and more a tip about not using Linkedin.

Do bear in mind that Linkedin is just a tool. And it's one that's very easy to spend too much time on. Endlessly tweaking your profile to make it just that little bit more perfect isn't going to bring you any new business. Nor is chatting away on a discussion group to buddies you already know.

Be judicious in your use of Linkedin. Get a good profile. Make sure you're connected to people you know would recommend you, then harness that network to get introductions to potential clients. In a couple of upcoming articles I'll show you who to do that in the most effective way.

But make sure you're not sucked in to spending hours a week playing around with it.

Selling

How to Run Effective Client Meetings – The KFC Approach

Posted by

Ian Brodie on July 17th, 2009.

Meeting Planner How many meetings with clients have you been to that were aimless, unstructured and poorly planned?

If you're like most professionals, probably quite a few.

The problem's particularly acute when it comes to business development meetings: your first few meetings with a potential client when you and they are trying to figure out whether you should work together. Make a mis-step here and the relationship is over before it's begun. Yet so many professionals try to “wing it” with little preparation and only vague objectives for the meeting such as “get to know each other” or “find out their issues”.

Set up your meetings like this and you'll find that time after time your opportunities progress as far as the first or second meeting – but no further. From the client's perspective they simply can't afford to invest time in meetings with professionals which don't seem to be going anywhere and where they don't get value from the event itself.

A Structured Approach to Client Meetings

UK Copywriter Andy Maslen has a neat acronym to help writers approach sales copy. And the approach can be extended very effectively to client meetings too.

The acronym is KFC:

K – Know

F – Feel

C – Commit

It starts with Commit. At the end of reading the copy (or in our case, at the end of the meeting) what do we want the client to do – to commit to? For sales copy it could be to pick up the phone, fill in a form or click to buy. For a business development meeting it could be to agree to a follow-up meeting to discuss a specific topic in more detail, or to introduce the professional to a senior colleague. Then, you figure out what the client or potential client must Know and Feel for them to be comfortable making the commitment.

Start With a Clear and Realistic Objective

Every client meeting must have a clear objective of what you want to achieve from the meeting. And in particular, you must identify what you want them to actually do as a result. Because if they don't do anything differently as a result of the meeting then what was the point?

Even if your goal is primarily to progress the relationship in some way – that progression needs to manifest itself in meaningful action. It may be something simple like providing more information, or making an introduction, or agreeing to a joint follow-up – but it needs to be something or the relationship really hasn't progressed.

Make the objective realistic too. Your end goal may be for them to hire you – but that's unlikely to happen in your first meeting. Winning business in professional services is more like a courtship than a “one night stand”.

A more realistic first meeting objective is to jointly agree on the key challenges the client faces that you could help with, to hold a follow-up meeting to explore these in more detail, for the client to do some homework and bring more details and data on the specific area, and for you to bring along some examples of similar work you've done for other clients.

Identify the Critical Success Factors for Achieving the Objective

Having a clear meeting objective is important (and it's surprising how many professionals don't actually do it) – but on it's own it's not enough.

You need to think through what it will take to achieve that objective in the meeting. That's where the K and the F come in.

So if your objective is to get a follow-up meeting to discuss a specific area to work on together – what will the client need to Know and Feel for them to agree to that?

Know is about facts. Perhaps they need to know the areas you work in, the types of clients you've worked with before, or that you're a real expert in your field. That will begin to give them the confidence that you have the skills to work on their problem.

Feel is trickier – but often more important. What do they need to feel to commit to your objective. Perhaps they need to feel that you understand them, that you're “on their side”. Perhaps they need to feel that you've really listened to them, or that you're a person they can trust.

How do you get your client to Know what they need to know and Feel what they need to feel? That's the art of business development.

Use Smart Questions to Help Clients “Know and Feel”

Firstly, recognise that you certainly won't effectively get across the right knowledge and particularly feelings through a long presentation about you and your company. That might get across some of the right knowledge – but it will create entirely the wrong feelings. Your client will feel that you're more interested in yourself than them – that you don't listen – and that meetings with you are going to be deathly dull.

One way to get across your knowledge and experience that doesn't come across as dull and self-promotional is to use short stories and anecdotes of similar client situations. I go into more details on this in my post on Selling With Stories.

Most often, the route to both establishing the things the client needs to know, and in getting them to feel the right way about you is to ask smart questions. Being able to ask the right questions that really home in on tough issues and the underlying causes will establish your expertise far more than any claims you might make about it, qualifications you might have or awards you might have won. And by empathising with the responses and occasionally mentioning similar situations you've been in, you'll establish the right feeling of “he understands me” and “he's been in this situation before – he'll know what to do to help”.

So the bulk of your preparation and structuring of the agenda for the meeting should be on the questions you need to ask to both find out what you need to know – but more importantly, to help the client know and feel the things you identified were critical for them to then be comfortable agreeing to the objective.

Close by Asking for a Commitment

And finally, of course, you must close by asking for that follow-up meeting, or the introduction you were looking for, or at the end of a series of meetings – actually asking for the business.

Sounds obvious: but so many professionals fail to do it. Fear of rejection kicks in and they close weakly without making a clear request for the action they're looking for. And so it doesn't happen.

But if you've planned and prepared correctly. If you've structured the meeting to cover all the bases necessary to help the client know and feel the right things – then they should be perfectly comfortable committing to the desired action.

PS You can download a free copy of the meeting planning template I use (as in the picture) here

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Reconnecting With Old Clients: A Step-By-Step Guide

Posted by

Ian Brodie on July 14th, 2009.

Reconnecting with old clients can be your very best source of new business and referrals.

You've probably even got a pretty good “little black book” of names – people who already know, like and trust you. People who could be good sources of referrals or even new work with their companies.

But there's a problem.

You're hesitating. You haven't been in touch for over a year. You don't want to seem like you're “begging” for work. You don't want to risk them seeing you as “too salesy”.

And wouldn't they be knocking on your door if they needed your help or had a referral for you?

Click here to read what you should do »

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