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Quickstart - Increase Your Chances of Attracting Your Ideal Clients
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Quickstart
Grow a Profitable Consultancy and Still Have Time for a Life
In this issue
Note from Beverley - Single Biggest Question
One Step Further - Increase Your Chances of Attracting Your Ideal Clients
Personal Reflections - The Dream Society?
Note from Beverley
One of the most frequent answers consultants and owner managers give me when I ask the question "what is your single, biggest business challenge?" is how do I get people to buy what I have to sell. My answer is always the same; stop selling and start attracting. This is the subject of the One Step Further section today.
Have a good week.
Beverley
bev@onestepfurther.co.uk
www.onestepfurther.co.uk
+44 (0)1258 817647
One Step Further
Wouldn't it be great if you had a steady stream of ideal clients? Wouldn't you love to have all the time that you want to allocate to work filled with ideal work?
Well stop selling and start attracting; stop pushing services onto prospective clients and start pulling ideal clients needs to provide services they actual want.
If you're like me, you don't like being sold to and there are many people who feel the same way. So if your ideal clients don't like being sold to how do you get their business and develop life long, profitable relationships with them?
Firstly you have to know who your ideal clients are, what specific problems they have and what your unique proposition is that can solve their problems. Secondly you need to get the word out there and create a dialogue with your ideal clients to let them know that their problems can be solved by your great services.
The art of marketing can be a joy to engage in and be part of or it can be a chore and an unprofitable drain on your business.
"People don't want to be "marketed TO"; they want to be "communicated WITH." Flint McGlaughlin
So why does so much marketing not hit the spot? Here are some common reasons
* No consistent and constant system - no planning and thought
* Ad hoc advertising - 1 off expensive adverts in non specific publications/locations
* Scatter gun approach - no targeting
* Confused messages - lack of clarity about on what and to whom you are speaking
* Selling a service not solving a problem/providing an opportunity - blowing your trumpet and blahing about how great you are rather than highlighting a problem or an opportunity and showing you have the ideal solution i.e. you need to be client centric not you centric
* Marketing materials that bore, are poorly thought out and don't engage
"You must have mind share before you can have market share." Christopher M. Knight
By using an attraction approach to your marketing you make a simple yet critical mind shift in how you think about your marketing. So this week my challenge to you is to go One Step Further and take some action
1. Compete a review of your current marketing activity and analyse what is working and what isn't along with assessing what activity has attracted most of your ideal clients.
2. Complete a review of your current marketing materials including your business card, website, brochures, presentations and any advertising you have done.
- Ask your ideal clients what attracted them to you as opposed to any one else
- Ask them what they think of your business card, website, brochure
- Ask them what they would do to better promote your services if they were you
3. Develop a marketing plan for the next 6 months which
- focuses on specific outcomes you want to achieve
- specifically targets your ideal clients
- delivers specific messages that will attract clients to you
- eliminates what isn't working
"In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope." Charles Revson
Personal Reflections
From time to time I read through some of the thoughts of Tom Peters and recently I saw this quote in one of his presentations.
"The sun is setting on the Information Society, even before we have fully adjusted to its demands as individuals and as companies. We have lived as hunters and as farmers, we have worked in factories and now we live in an information based society whose icon is the computer. We stand facing the fifth kind of society: the Dream Society ...Future products will have to appeal to our hearts, not to our heads. Now is the time to add emotional value to products and services." Rolf Jensen, The Dream Society: How the Coming Shift from Information to Imagination Will Transform Your Business
If that is true and as providers of services and products we do not start to consider the emotional benefit of what we provide are we doomed?
Well doomed may be a little dramatic but some companies already create their brand and customer value propositions this way.
• They already consider how someone will feel when using their product/service
• They already consider how someone will feel when others see them using their product/service.
• They already consider how someone will act as a result of buying and using their product/service.
I believe that more and more forward thinking companies are starting to consider the "whole buyer/consumer"; their physical, emotional, social and intellectual needs and wants both in the process of considering a purchase, the process of purchasing and the process of using.
If other companies are already doing this is it time for you too?
Best Regards
Bev
bev@onestepfurther.co.uk
www.onestepfurther.co.uk
+44 (0)1258 817647 |
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