The 8020 Blog

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Its easy to think that the reason we want a new client is so we can make a sale however it’s more profitable when we begin to think that the purpose of a sale is to get a client.

(It’s OK if you need to read that twice!)

The real wealth in your small business lies in the quality and quantity of relationships that you have with prospects and clients.

If you have a relationship of trust and respect with many prospects and clients you can make multiple sales to them over an extended period of time - so the real value lies not in the sale, but in the client.

This different way of thinking will cause you to re-evaluate how much you are prepared to invest in order to get a new client.

It will also make you think very carefully about the levels of service you provide to those clients and how to respond when you have a client complaint to deal with.

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I have a close friend whose business is languishing without enough clients. Sam (name changed) is a therapist and has around 5 clients a week. His capacity is 40 clients a week.

Sam’s answer to the client slump is to …

• Clean his offices daily

• Read more books on his specialty

• Talk to me about how slow things are

• Talk to other therapists to make sure they are slow too

• Enroll in more therapy courses

• Talk to me again about how slow things are

Sam listens to my advice and nods sagely as I suggest he build some marketing systems and also tell him what they should be and how to build them.

After listening and nodding Sam reverts to the above list. Bear in mind that Sam actually has the time and ability to act on my advice.

Sam needs some GOYFA … Get Of Your Fat Ass … and do something. It’s not rocket science. If anyone wants more clients they need to firstly build the marketing systems (ezine, reactivation letters, advertorial, yellow pages, referral systems, newsletter, continuity club, seminars, webinars, articles, blog, twitter … the list goes on) and then they need to GOYFA …

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I’ve written on the subject of handling client/prospect complaints before but I think it’s worth writing again.

The basic idea is this: “if you stuff up then fess up and fix up” so that you “turn the frown on your clients face into a smile”.

I recently conducted a large marketing campaign which, I am pleased to say, was highly successful and resulted in 167 people (to date) pulling out their credit cards and ordering from www.8020Center.com

But due to a problem we failed to foresee (involving the long holiday weekend here in Australia and our unmanned office), a number of people continued to receive multiple email reminders about the offer after they had ordered. Not a good look.

Most people were quite good about our mistake and either ignored it our let me know about it and in most cases we were able to stop our “little digital man inside the computer” (a.k.a. our auto-responder system) from sending out more emails.

But for Paul (a very patient person!) the little digital man persisted in sending out more reminders, even after my clear instructions for him to desist.

So by way of illustrating the point of this post here’s an extract from my email to him …

Hi Paul, I’m personally going in right now to rip out the little digital man’s heart through his throat.

(My relationship with this technology is definitely in the love/hate category.)

OK … got it in my hands now … it’s messy and still beating but it won’t last long … where’s my dog gone … here boy …

Right … all done.

By way of apology I’d like to offer you a gift … if you go to this secret URL you’ll find 25 interviews that I have conducted with very competent business leaders … you can download any or all of them. I normally sell this package for over $400 and I hope that it will signal to you that I’m serious in my apology (please keep the link to yourself).

Paul, I have left you subscribed to just the one list which is our monthly Ezine … content rich … let me know if you want me to pull the plug on that one as well otherwise you should get your first copy  on the 1st of next month … after I have found a new little digital man.

Okay so that was the email - but I am not showing you this so you think “Gee Tom what  swell guy you are” … no … it’s to reinforce the message that saying sorry is not enough … you have to send the client/prospect away with a smile.

Saying sorry means squat (as in nothing) and “actions speak louder than words” so if you stuff up, then fess up and fix up.

The fess up and fix up are something we need to do anyway, if for no other reason than a stand point of integrity but in addition it’s best to think about a complaint as a marketing opportunity … better to have people out there in the market place telling others about your “fix up” than your “stuff up”.

And yes, if you were one of those who got a minor avalanche of annoying emails from my now-deceased little digital man then email me at Tom@8020Center.com and I’ll send you the link to the interviews with my compliments …

Last reason to “fess up and fix up” … you will sleep better at night.

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I’ve been resisting the tug of Social Media Marketing for some years now but the case for engaging in blogs, Twitter, YouTube and possibly facebook is now compelling.

Case in point: David Thorne had 60,000 people confirming their attendance at “Kate’s birthday party” (a fictitious event at a real apartment) and another 180,000 waiting to have their attenance confirmed. Then facebook smelt a rat and shut it down.

Click here for the full story (hopefully the link is still live, unlike David’s invitation).

Now perhaps face book is not the best business to business social marketing medium but it still begs the question: if a prankster can get 240,000 people interested in gate crashing a party that doesn’t exist … what can you do with Social Media marketing to get new clients interested in you and your business.

Hmmm … worth thinking about huh?

Click here for a link to a video recording of a webinar that Social Media marketing guru, Russell Holland presented on the subject: How To Use Social Media Marketing For Real Business Returns

Enjoy.

PS if you want a good belly laugh check out David’s web site here: http://www.27bslash6.com/.

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My last post was entitled  “Show Up”.

It was about how virtually all 7 figure earners will faithfully turn up to programs and attend every session in a course where many others drop out after the the 2nd or 3rd meetings.

If you find you are experiencing a similar issue with client burn out there are a couple of things that you can do to extend the average “lifetime” of your clients.

The first and most obvious is to make sure that your product is meeting the needs of your ideal client and that it’s delivered in such a way that they actually get value out of it.

The second, often over-looked tactic, is to educate your clients in regard to what they will be feeling and thinking and when.

For example, in the later 1990’s I was running a three year curriculum based workshop program for business owners called the Entrepreneurs Success Programme (ESP) where clients would attend a workshop every 3 months over the 3 years.

As a part of the new client orientation process we would explain that sometime between the 2nd and 3rd meeting they may feel like they are not making progress and would want to give up. We would also tell them why that was not a good idea and we provided testimonials of other clients who had felt the same but who had persisted and were glad they had done so because of the great results they were getting.

This is like a “pre-emptive” strike. When the client began to think about quitting they generally recalled what we had said and more often than not they would choose to continue.

Depending on the group and the year, we normally had between 67% - 75% of our clients renewing from year 1 to 2 and 90% renewal rate from year 2 to 3.

We were the envy of every competitor including the universities and institutes of management.

By way contrast, an internationally recognized private sector competitor of ours, also marketing a 3 year business development programme, was literally losing 90% of clients before the 6 month mark.

Why? Well the truth is I don’t know for sure but I can take a guess.

The quality of our competitors clients appeared to be similar to ours so that was not a factor.

But we packaged our content in workshops and CDs whereas our competitor packaged it all in a series or booklets and we also kept our content very pragmatic and shied away from nice theories.

We also did a very good job of creating realistic expectations in our marketing message (see my post “The Perfectly Balanced Marketing Message”) and we extended that “expectation education” process during the new client orientation process as mentioned above.

The preemptive strike is an excellent client retention tactic - figure out what clients and thinking and when they will probably start thinking that. Then include that as a part of your client orientation program.

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In my last blog I wrote about how important it is to strike a balance in your marketing message  between:

1. A clear and compelling offer and…

2. Incorporating believability and “do-ability” (as in “yes, I can achieve those results too”)

The mistake I made in launching my current business three years ago was to make my Customer Value Statement “Make your business worth millions“.

I’d had a bunch of clients who had achieved that and I thought the idea would appeal to my target market so that’s the message I adopted.

Fortunately, enough people found the the hook compelling - partly because I backed up my claim with solid testimonial evidence or because they knew my work from past experience.

However in adopting the message “Make Your Business Worth Millions” I also lost a great deal of people that I was targeting … these were people with good businesses who were doing well and who may well have believed that others had done it … but failed to buy into “do-ability” as in “I could make my business worth millions too”.

I now get a better response with “Get more clients, make more money, have more fun“. It sounds more achievable as well as more do-able.

What’s your message? Is it clear and compelling and does it incorporate believability and do-ability?

Worth thinking about…

It would be remiss of me not to let you know that today I put 200 packages up for grabs … each one contains $716.83 of profit-explosion material including 3 very significant videos and 6 CDs plus a whole bunch of other cool stuff … for no charge, other that a small one-off postal fee which does not even cover half my costs of shipping it all to you.

I promised my clients I would give them first option to grab the packages which I did this morning. They have snatched 91 of them so there are 107 left … you can take a look and see if you want to secure one of the remaining packages while they are still there … click here: Money Rainmaker Gift and you’ll find out why I giving it all away.

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Yanik Silver is an on-line marketer who has made millions and has also taught others how to make small fortunes as well. He’s written many “how to make it big” style books and courses.

Interestingly though, he says that his best selling book is NOT about making millions. It’s called “Moonlighting On The Internet” and its main promise is that readers will learn how to make a couple of hundred dollars extra per month (to a couple of thousand) over the internet by putting in a few extra hours at home every night.

There are a couple of lessons in here that explain why it’s his best seller.

One is that people are looking for “believability”, as in “yes that sounds possible”. Many, many more people will believe (and buy) the idea that making $500 a month over the internet is achievable as opposed to making millions.

The second lesson is about “do-ability” as in “I think I can do that too“.

If your marketing message is “believable” and “doable” then you will sell a whole lot more than others who make their claims so big that people question them, or at the very least question whether they as the reader could get the same results.

Of course you still have to make your “hook” interesting and compelling … but there is a balance, a middle path between under and over promising. (American-style hype over-promises but the natural Kiwi and Aussie style tends to under-promise.)

So have a look at your marketing messages. Would your Ideal Clients find them clear and compelling as well as believable and doable?

If so, then you have achieved the perfect balance.

In the next blog I will give you a real life example of how I made a costly mistake before I learned this lesson.

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When it comes to marketing, business owners need to develop two types of discipline.

There’s the discipline of doing marketing (a little every day is the recipe that works best for me) and then there is the discipline of NOT doing other things.

As a business owner it’s likely that you know that you need to do marketing but instead you probably revert to activity where there is no threat of rejection or failure i.e. your Comfort Zone.

Comfort Zone activities include improving your product, dealing with suppliers, getting the financial records sorted out, attending staff meetings, clearing emails and so on and so on and so on.

The key is to get the hell out of your Comfort Zone, take the rejection (you WILL get it) and do some marketing.

Of course, do it smart … figure out a clear and compelling value proposition … but then DO IT.

You will never experience growth whilst sitting in your Comfort Zone - it’s as true in your personal life as it is in your business.

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom” - Anais Nin

.. is not “everyone”.

“Everyone” was the answer I received from a new client today about who her target market was … to be fair, I did not make the question detailed enough, nor did I give her sufficient examples, up to that point in time.

But her answer highlights a very important principle though in regard to marketing strategy.

The principle is that the more “niched” you make your target market the more appealing you can make  your service/product offerings and the more powerful you can make your marketing.

When it comes to marketing and getting more clients, specificity is power.

For example, an accountant who thinks that “everyone” is a potential client will probably wind up with a lot of tax compliance work with low margin invoices because he/she ends up competing on price.

But the accountant who targets (for example) businesses with over 2 million turnover and more than 10 staff can create services that meet the specific needs of that niche e.g. how to fund growth, how to get EBIT up, payroll, HR issues, time issues etc AND can craft a message to that market that speaks to those needs.

This makes marketing MUCH more powerful … and the product/service offerings much more appealing. Together, this is quite a potent combination.

A common mistake you may find yourself making is trying to be all things to all people … out of fear of missing out on a potential sale.

It takes courage to niche … but ironically you will not miss out on many sales, if any … and you will find it easier to pick up a lot more clients within your chosen niche.

Specialists command more respect than general practitioners and also a much bigger pay check.

The smaller the niche, to a point, the better return you will get on your marketing dollar.

At the risk of dropping a “niche cliche” … the riches are in the niches.