In Sales Conversations, Specificity is King
When talking with a potential client, do you find yourself being too vague when describing your business? Don’t worry! This trap is easy to fall into — and easy to get out of. When it comes to having sales conversations, specificity is king.
Hooray, You Have a Marketing Plan! What’s Next?
All the experts say that as a self-employed professional, you need a marketing plan, so you’ve designed one. Good for you! The very fact that you’ve taken the time to think about how you want to market your business and written it down will increase your odds of success at getting clients.
Consistency and Accountability: Complementary Bedfellows
Are consistency and accountability related?
Yes!
Consistency is the capacity to show up for something over and over, to produce results that are equivalent over time; stay the course, steady as she goes.
Accountability means you stay true to your word, that you can be counted on. You say what you’re going to do, and you do it, holding yourself answerable.
What do these have to do with getting the word out about your small business?
Sales for the Asking
“So that’s what I have to offer you, Mr. Prospect. What do you think?”
“Well, Ms. Professional, I’d like to think about it.”
“Okay, may I call you next week?”
Does this dialogue sound at all familiar? Yet another sales conversation is ending with a stall from the prospective client. Is he actually interested in hiring you, or was that just a polite way to say no? What exactly is it that he wants to think about?
Get More Clients by Doing Less
I’ve been hearing from a lot of overworked entrepreneurs lately. “I’m worn out from going to networking events,” they say, or, “I’m tired of always having to think up new stuff to post online.” They’re working pretty hard at marketing, it seems -– networking, blogging, posting to social media, speaking, making calls, sending out email blasts, and more.
When they don’t get the results they want from marketing, entrepreneurs usually try to take on more. If their focus has been on in-person marketing, they begin marketing online. Or if they have been writing articles and blogging and being active on social media, they decide to start speaking and giving workshops. Or if they’ve been going to lots of events and lunches and coffee dates, they add in a call-mail-call campaign.
Huff, puff… it makes me tired just to write about all that activity.
Getting Your Must-Do Marketing Items Done Before Year’s End
As the holiday season approaches, it can be overwhelming to think about what needs to be done before the end of the year. For you personally, there are often extra family and social obligations. Adding your business marketing to-dos on top of that can create an even bigger sense of obligation and overwhelm.
Luckily, there’s something you can do about that.
When getting your end-of-year marketing done, try these tips to make your life easier and create space for those things that are most important, personally and professionally.
In Marketing, an Action Step Is Worth a Thousand Words
We self-employed professionals spend a great deal of our marketing effort on searching for the right words. We read books, take classes, and hire consultants to help us write copy for our marketing materials. Composing web pages, writing sales emails, and drafting ad copy consumes hours or days of precious marketing time.
It appears, though, that many professionals have mistaken all this wordsmithing for productive action.
Don’t get me wrong; the words you use to market yourself are important and deserve your attention. But crafting the message, and effectively delivering the message, are not at all the same thing.
Video: Overcoming What Stops You
Last year was quite a year, and it’s left me with the question of what holds me back -– beyond a pandemic, of course.
As a long-time business owner, there are plenty of things I could list: negative self-talk, faulty assumptions, out-of-date self-image…
What Stops You from Marketing… and What to Do About It
The number one complaint my clients and students — self-employed professionals — bring me about their marketing is that they aren’t doing enough of it. You would think this would be easy to fix. I could just tell them to spend more time marketing and selling, and that would solve their problem. But like so many other challenges in life, knowing what needs to be done doesn’t necessarily make that thing occur.
Consider losing weight, for example. If it were as simple as being told to eat less or exercise more, we would all be as thin as we wished just by deciding to make it so. Since that doesn’t happen very often; it’s clear we humans need a bit more help.
Advertising Doesn’t Equal Marketing
I asked a new client recently what he had been doing to market his professional services. “Everything,” he said. “I’ve been running pay-per-click ads online, I hired someone to write a sales letter and mailed it to a list of local companies, I have a banner ad in my professional association’s directory, I’ve even been posting flyers around town… and I still have almost no business.”
“Ah hah,” I replied, “I think we’ve uncovered your problem. You actually haven’t been marketing your business. What you have been doing is advertising.”
