I’ve just read the latest post from Doberman Dan and I really think you should read it if you accept paying clients.
He talks about the danger signals flagging potential “bad clients”. For example, clients who try to get you to do some “work on spec” or waive your upfront fee. Or a share of royalties later on.
When they try to do that, they don’t take you (or your skills) seriously. And if they don’t take you seriously, expect further trouble down the line.
If people don’t want to pay full price for you, they don’t value what you do. And if they don’t apreciate your true value to them, they are more likely to quibble, fuss and cause problems which are trivial at best, at worst non-existent.
On the other hand, the best customers, the ideal clients will happily pay full price and consider it worth every penny. They will be less trouble and more enjoyable to work fo.
People who don’t appreciate your true value and who are trying to get you cheap up-front are playing games. It’s simply a mind game to get you to de-value yourself. And once they see they can do that, they’ll do it some more and they will push it just as far as you will let them.
Client transactions are about transactions of value. You give me value for the value I give you.
In the same manner, I find the more clients insist on quantifying your service with an “hourly rate” the less they appreciate the value of the knowledge, experience and expertise you’re bringing to whatever you do.
Value what you do at the level of the value it creates, and not the amount of hours you put into it.
It’s a difficult decision for any small business owner to turn away business in any climate. If you’re involved in any negotation, always have a walk-away figure decided before the meeting starts.
And every client meeting is a two way interview. They are working out whether they want to work you, likewise you should be working out whether you want to work with them.
We’ve all been screwed over at some point into doing some work on the cheap because we weren’t confident of our own value, and accepted less than what we were truly worth for whatever reason.
But I think the lesson here is probably more psychological than financial. And accepting any commission that is less than your value is not only bruising to the bank account, it’s bruising to your self-esteem – which must be preserved at all costs.
Conclusion? You have to value yourself and what you can do. And you have to insist that others do so too if they want to work with you.
But the best way to stay in touch is to join my mailing list. And as soon as you join, I’ll deliver a killer profit report about how to double your business in 2 years.
Get really absolutely and definitely clear about who is your target market.
The more you know about them, the better you can come up with clever ideas about how to target them precisely.
30) Call everybody you know.
Call for a catch up, and when the conversation turns to what you’re doing – tell them about your business and what you’re doing. And if they know anybody who could do with your service, suggest that they pass on your name and number.
Don’t pressure sell, just get the word out. And if your friends want to do business with you, quote your full price.
Business is business, and discounts don’t make for better referrals later on.
You’ll have more respect for yourself and so will your friends.
29) Network in the real world.
Joining a networking club or meeting isn’t about selling to everyone in the room.
It’s about expanding your social network and getting word out about yourself. It’s about being known as the “go to” guy or girl for whatever you do.
A lot of business happens by recommendation and word of mouth – so have a great 30 second sales pitch selling you, be a good connector (i.e. connecting the people you meet with business opportunities whenever you can) and expand your social network. Networking isn’t just limited to professional activity.
You can network at practically any social group or event too.
28) Stop Advertising.
Stop advertising that clearly isn’t producing sales for you.
If it’s not working, you need to re-think. Save your cash, work out what you can improve and go at it again.
Every single small business I know has tried dozens of things that don’t work.
That’s fine, don’t beat yourself up.
Save your energy to look for the right way to connect with your customers.
27) WWWHWW = All the right info
Look at your advertising. Have you got all the information.
Who? What? When? Where? Why?
The most important of these is why.
Give your customer enough emotionally motivating reasons to buy from you. Work out the “why” and you have cracked half the marketing challenge.
26) Stand out. Be Remarkable.
Don’t be afraid of standing out. Seth Godin advises business owners and companies to become remarkable.
Stand out – in a good way – for your customers.
25) Simple, Focused Identity
Logo and brand. Create an identity and stick to it.
Don’t spend money which you haven’t got on a logo. Save it for getting customers.
The London Olympics 2012 logo is terrible and cost a supposed £400,000 (over $650,000).
The easiest company name and brand logo to adopt is your own name.
Forget fancy pictures have a simple text logo – then focus on delivering a great service which will win you fans and people who will champion and recommend you.
24) Can You Repeat That?
Repetition works to make sales.
Single adverts rarely create an overwhelming response.
Therefore aim to reduce the cost of your individual marketing efforts so you can increase your exposure.
23) You ought to build that email list.
Build your email list and market to it cheaply.
Not just of prospects you want to buy from you, but also existing customers you can encourage to return and do business with you.
Email marketing with companies like Aweber is much cheaper than going with a marketing agency or a bespoke system.
It also allows you the opportunity to segment your lists into specific and more targeted groups.
22) Spread your information.
Business cards and leaflets. They make not profit do no good sitting in a box.
Set yourself a challenge to get rid of as many as possible each week to whomever will take them from you. Keep score. And give yourself a reward when you set a new personal record.
21) Expect Referrals
Tell your new customers that you are starting out and you want to make them so happy that they will go out and tell all their friends about you.
This shows them your commitment, but it also sets an expectation that they will recommend you when actually do make them really happy.
20) Courtesy Costs Nothing
And courtesy makes sales.
Say please. Say thank you.
Make eye contact and smile genuinely.
People buy from people they like.
You don’t have to be obseqious or sycophantic to make sales (I bet they lose a lot of sales).
Just be courteous.
19) Get Into Your Role For Confidence
Act the part.
Often small business owners and start up entrepreneurs don’t feel confident to begin with, especially with face to face conversations.
Visualise yourself acting the part of the perfect [whatever it is you do].
Study the role. Create a script and practise it religiously.
Then when you do it, make it seem and feel like you’re saying it for the very first time, like it’s just occurred to you right now, and it’s all happening naturally and spontaneously.
18) Joint venture.
Who can you team up in a similar (but not the same) industry to share customers, databases and referrals.
I have a local joint venture with a web designer.
I take my clients to him, because I know he’s the best in town.
He sends business my way for the marketing I specialise in.
We both win, and so do the customers, and look a lot more professional as a result.
17) Get Out Of The Way
Remove every possible obstacle that makes it harder for your customers to buy.
Make the pricing easy to understand.
Make it easy to understand what they get and how they can pay.
Try not to get them to fill in forms, and when they have to, keep them as short as possible.
16) Where Did They Come From?
The most important tool you have at your disposal is being able to ask your customers how they found out about you.
This tells you which marketing is working and which isn’t Stop what isn’t working and do more of what is working.
15) Money Is Time Too
Time is also a scarce resource – cost that into your marketing efforts too.
For example, don’t use Twitter unless you integrate it fully into your marketing process.
Small and start up companies are not just cash but also time poor.
Ask yourself – does something like Twitter really target the kind of customers I want to reach? How much time will it cost me?
And would my time be more profitably spent doing something else? (tip: it probably would)
Every marketing decision must also be made in the context of the time you have available to give to it and how much money it can bring you back.
14) Small Steps
Instead of asking your customers to make one giant leap, make your sales process a series of baby steps that prospects can take to qualify themselves and find out a little bit more about you without any risk.
Contact over time generates familiarity and trust – vital ingredients of a sale.
13) Goal!
Set goals. What does success look like for you?
The brain is a goal seeking mechanism and aims at what you give it.
So set positive and realistic goals. Break them down into chunks and start taking action to get there.
12) Conquer the Gremlins
Tackle your mental obstacles. De-motivation. Paralysis. Fear.
Fight back with bags of Faith, Hope, Optimism, Persistence, Patience, Courage and Sheer Bloody-Mindedness (i.e. a tenacious unwillingness to yield to defeat).
Need inspiration on that?
Try listening to a Winston Churchill speech and you’ll know what I mean.
11) What’s Next?
Keep a “What Next?” list. Write down all your marketing ideas in one place, and keep expanding on that list. When you need to do something new, review the list, select the most promising (and affordable) idea and that’s what you should do next.
10) What’s Your Story?
Get your story right.
The right marketing story will open doors, create sales, profits and translate smoothly across every single channel (online and offline).
What is your story? Write it down.
A compelling story in black and white beats a hopeless story in full colour.
9) Popularity Breeds Popularity
Create an air of popularity. People flock just like sheep. So they respond positively to signs which imply that you are popular. Hard at the beginning for any start up absolutely, but after you crack it…success.
8) Witnesses = Proof & Evidence
Collect testimonials religiously.
Put them everywhere.
On your website, in marketing materials, on adverts – and anywhere else you can think of.
Make sure they are specific and personal by getting your customers to say why they chose you and why they loved your service.
7) Controlled Spending & Costing = Profit
Unless you’re in the business of giving away money, sales will only ever create profit when met with sensibly controlled costs.
That also includes giving discounts as a promotional tool.
2 for 1 means half the profit per transaction, and having to work twice as hard to make the same profit. Are you crazy?
There are better ways to drum up customers.
6) Get on TV
Embed a simple video in your site to create user engagement an. Attention spans are super short online and a good, simple, concise video can help sustain attention and help your customers understand what you do, how you can help them, and why they should choose you.
5) Reputation is everything.
Look after your reputation in everything you do, and your reputation will look after you in return.
And before you go out and do tons of stuff – what do you want that reputation to be?
Decide on how you want people to see you, and how you must be in order to grow your business.
4) Just One More Step
Take another step. And another. And another.
Keep taking action, looking at what happens, then adjusting your strategy.
When, (when and not if) you fall over, dust yourself off, have a cup of tea, and get back in the roiling scramble for customers.
3) Write Yourself To Expert Level
Keep writing your blog. Many people start a blog, but few people keep doing it. And there are lots of good SEO reasons why you should.
Make a commitment to use your blog to position yourself as an expert and a guide in your chosen field.
Keep it subject specific, and write articles that play to the search terms your customers use the most.
Write the kind of subject specific content you think your customers will love to bookmark and squirrel away
Likewise seek opportunities to be the expert with local or even national newspapers and publications
2) Quality Not Quantity
Instead of just trying to speak to more people, aim to speak to more of the right people.
Introduce a qualifying process to work out who deserves your best marketing efforts.
Introduce a permission based marketing ethic – by getting your customers to raise their hands for more information. For more information read Seth Godin’s Permission Based Marketing.
1) Measure it.
Measure your marketing. Until you know how well its performing you don’t know whether it’s profitable or not.
Until you know what works and what doesn’t you’re just blindly feeling your way around in the dark.
Tackling the fear of rejection and/or failure is about the most potent obstacle you’ll ever be faced with and which you’ll overcome.
The fear it creates can often lead to business decisions which aren’t, by anyone’s standards, profitable.
In business, and especially in small businesses and start-ups, it’s worthwhile asking yourself consistently:
What am I afraid of doing next?
And by that I mean, if you weren’t afraid of anything, what would you do next?
It’s a powerful question because it may well identify important actions which we’ve overlooked because we don’t want to contemplate them.
It’s easy as a home worker for example, to spend a a disproportionate amount of time on Twitter or “learning” when actually you should be making sales calls, or doing something else you don’t like.
We don’t like to look at what we fear, but by facing them we grow, we open up new possibilities.
And if it’s just as hard for a competitor to pick up the phone and make a sales call (or whatever it is you have to do) you have a competitive advantage the moment you break through it and act even despite your fear.
Courage is taking the next step, it’s an accumulation of small steps taken.
Moreover courage happens only in the presence of fear.
What are you afraid of doing next to make your business more profitable?
I’ve been rooting around everywhere this morning because I’ve mis-placed a £350 cheque. Most frustrating. I think I hid it in “a good place” which turns out to be so good, I can’t for the life of me track it down – yet.
But in searching I came across a couple of things which I wrote a long time back.
The first was, “Do what brings you to life.”
Life is too short to spend it doing something you hate.
If what you’re doing isn’t a consuming passion – hard work will seem harder, the days will be longer (in a bad way) and what you’g doing can become a drudge.
That’s not advice to immediately drop tools and career change though. I’ve done that myself in the past couple of years (I took just over a year out and built a 1600m squared kitchen garden and gew vegetables) and whilst it’s been an unforgettable experience, I also know that money is important too.
I also know that Mark Twain’s “make your vocation your vacation” has a spike in its tail. You can destroy your passion for something you love because you’ve turned it into a job.
At the end of the day, there are no rules as such. I don’t think you can do your best in a job or company you hate.
I think you should do what fits your aptitudes and inclinations and your natural talents should inform your choice of profession, or start-up business. Know yourself to make the right choices. And be prepared to make a few wrong choices wot work out what the right one is for you.
In the end though, at most, you have 75-100 years at best. Life goes fast.
Work out what brings you to life. Then work at the best way to get as much of that as possible.
Try this the very next time you need to get a lot done – and let me know how you get on.
I use lists a lot.
I like the achievement of ticking things off, seeing what I’ve done.
But lately, the big blank pieces of a4 paper, the neverending lists, have become just a little unsettling.
Daunting even. I’ve achieved less than my high standards dictate.
At the weekend I wrote a list of 60 business tasks I wanted to accomplish. And today I’ve been on fire.
The big difference? My list was on lined paper.
Perhaps lined paper structured my thoughts better. Perhaps I just had a great day. Whow knows? I’ll be testing it out
I recommend you try it too. Just to prove me crazy even
Here’s how to do it:
Write down everything you have to do.
Without feeling pressured to try and do everything, just do the most achievable, next most important things you can do right now.
Whenever you complete something, write Victory! at the end. I learnt this over 10 years ago, can;t for the life of me remember the book, but will quote it as soon as I find out.
Perhaps I’m just being a bit crazy. So try it yourself.
Prove me wrong or right – doesn’t matter.
Compare lined paper with plain paper on your To Do List and see which works best for you.
And leave your comments here to let me know about your results…
We live in a culture where we desperately want everything easy: quick fixes, the short cut, instant – just add water, the easy way to… I’m sure you get the idea.
So we’ve developed a consumer culture of taking the line of least resistance. The easy way out.
As I’m writing this article, I’m getting the first aches of an absolutely gruelling workout I have with my personal trainer this morning. Lifting weights and building muscle isn’t supposed to be easy. Because what makes muscle grow is being taken to failure. Then it grows back stronger. Training to failure is by definition the way you make a muscle grow.
Some things in life are harder than others. And often they tend to be the things that are worthwhile in the long run.
There are always obstacles and challenges along the way. Everyone experiences them.
I’ve learned to see over time, that the more obstacles there are to achieving something, often the less competition there is out on the other side. The very fact that something is hard weeds out the people who are less committed and less determined.
Tough conditions (i.e. a rough economy) gets rid of competitors who know less about marketing/cashflow/keeping customers happy – than you.
Because of that, I’ve learned to appreciate obstacles and challenges.
The more of them you can put between you and your competitors, the more of a competitive advantage you accrue, ready for the upturn.
I believe practically every small business can benefit from building an email list.
But as with every form of marketing, and particularly ones involving technology, there are low cost ways of doing it and there are very expensive ways of doing it.
1) Don’t Go To A Marketing Agency
Unless you are awash with cash which you want to disappear quickly, don’t approach a marketing or a web design agency. If you do, it’s quite likely you’ll be offered some kind of “emailing system” which allows you to edit and send emails to your direct marketing list.
Almost inevitably “bespoke” or “configured” or “tailored” systems (which you don’t need) are going to cost a lot more than other perfectly acceptable online solutions available at a much lower cost. Companies like Aweber can provide professional email marketing solutions from as little as $19 (about £12 at the time of writing) for fledgling lists up to 500 susbcribers. Over that, and you pay a little extra for volume.
2) Do Get Permission
To email your customers about anything other than a transaction, you need to get their permission. That’s why it’s worth building into your entire marketing process. It costs nothing to gain permission to market to your customers as you build your business. Online subscription forms such as Aweber provides handle the whole opt-in process with a double confirmation. Because of this process, they’ve gained a good reputation for deliverability and are perhaps more likely to get past some spam filters than other companies.
You can get permission at the point of contact via a whole variety of means: small discounts, free trials, free information etc. But the best way to build your email list is simply making a clear commitment to building your subscriber base throughout the various marketing channels your business uses.
In the UK, you are required to comply with the terms of the Data Protection Act 1998. In short it means that for email marketing, customers must be able to opt-in, be able to find out about what information you hold about them and be able to request that information you hold about them be corrected or removed from your database.
3) Start With A Plan
Before you send a single email, work out why your customers will want to hear from you. Work out what you want to achieve with your email marketing. Work out what your customer really wants to hear about. Then start trialling.
4) Short Is Often Better
People are overloaded with information. You don’t need to write lots. In fact, short emails are often better. Sometimes all your customer might want to hear about is a new product or a special offer. If that’s all they want, then use your email marketing for that.
5) Use Email to Build Trust
Repetition and visibility build trust. And trust builds customers. Email can build relationships with customers if you adopt the right tone (friendly, conversational) and talk about things your customers are interested in. If they have signed up for your newsletter, chances are overwhelmingly that they are interested in your products. So talk about them.
6) Avoid Marketese
Avoid overly promotional language in your emails. It won’t get you sales. It will turn customers off.
7) Get The Right Frequency
Too little is better than too much. If you can’t deliver an email which interests your customers, don’t do on for the sake of it. If you have the knack of engaging your customers, and constantly delivering new information/content/persepectives it;s quite possible that you could email as often as you want. Your rate of unsubscribes will help you be the judge of the best frequency.
8) Personalize
Doesn’t need to be anything more complicated than “Dear Bob” at the beginning of your email, but it works wonders. For additional punch, use their first name in the subject line.
9) Integrate
Make email marketing a central part of your business and work out how you can integrate with the rest of your sales and marketing processes. Integration means making it a tool that’s central to your business, not just for its own sake, but because it’s profitable, cheap and fast to deploy.
It’s like trying to lose weight and wanting the instant fix (pills, potions, contraptions and new exercise fads), because it’s new and attractive and well, everyone’s talking about it.
And I have to tell you I haven’t seen one person indulge in a fad and make a lifelong change.
The people at the gym who have really got the results did things differently:
They educated themselves and got the best information.
They focused on just one or two changes
They measured their results and got feedback about what was working and what wasn’t.
They stuck to it – they kept on doing it
You see, what works, what really works are the basics. And sticking with them.
If you want to grow your business, find more customers, make more profit, it’s the same thing.
Get the right information first.
Focus on one or two changes.
Measure your results about what’s working and what isn’t.
And stick to doing that like glue.
That’s the difference between successful small business marketers and the failures who surf endlessly for the next instant fix. And there are plenty of people out there who are trying to relieve you of your hard earned money by trying to convince you it actually exists.
So here’s my lifelong fix which you will never forget: stick to these principles like glue and you won’t go far wrong.
Let’s care less about shiny new ideas, and work with the tried, the tested, the reliable and the proven methods – and leanring to get them right and do them better on a daily basis.
Because that’s what is going to make you more profit.
