The three core ways to get more clients.
That's we're going to talk about now.
And let's be honest marketing your client's business.
Is not the same as marketing your own business.
So there's a lot of marketers who listen to this.
And they may be thinking of themselves.
I'm I'm good at my craft.
I get good results for my clients and I'm a good marketer.
And yet it can be very difficult to market for yourself.
Can be very hard to see objectively your own situation can be very hard to write.
Copy.
For yourself, it can be very hard to position yourself.
And it can be very hard to just sort of to do the mechanical things needed
to get clients consistently over time.
And so, um, the one thing that I just want to say, look, It
doesn't make you a bad marketer.
If you have difficulty getting new clients, there's just a framework.
That you can think about and the different way to think about getting more clients.
The may help you.
Create necessary structures and pieces.
To attract more clients, your business.
And you've got to remember that consulting clients in particular, you want to
design them in a way that their longterm.
Engagements with long-term thinking people.
And so I have some clients that I've spent between two and $300,000.
Total with me over, you know, four or five years.
And so these are, these are really.
Valuable clients and you don't need necessarily a lot of them,
you know, I work with between seven and 10 clients at any given time.
For my consulting work different than my coaching and membership stuff.
But that is more than enough to sustain a multiple six figures
business and more than enough to keep me busy all year round.
So that's what I want to talk to you about today.
And.
We'll jump right into it.
So let's get into the.
The pillars that we're talking about, let's find a way to put structure to
this, that it feels a little bit less.
Nebulous and it makes it easier for you to break it all down and Creating that system
that you would create for your clients.
You know, if you're like me, you're building
Structure with your clients and then you're turning it into a system.
So let's do the same for you.
So number one is looking good on paper.
And what that means is if I refer someone to you, do you
look like a credible choice?
Do you say you do the things that I'm.
That, um, you know, that, that, that you want people to, to know you for.
Do I, if I, you know, just thinking in terms of referrals alone, would I
feel comfortable referring somebody you, because you seem credible
and trustworthy on paper, meaning.
All your messaging and your positioning and your content, everything about it,
which we'll talk about, stands out.
As being relevant to the person I want to refer you to, then that
makes you a good referral candidate.
I can't tell you how many times I've referred people, but I've been
like, you have to basically ignore their website because a, it does.
It's not good.
It doesn't exist, but they're really good at their job.
Uh, so, you know, it kind of creates a little bit of a difficult scenario
where people are putting their.
Reputation on the line to refer clients to you.
And then if you don't look it on paper that.
Typically people will just, don't fewer people will want to refer people to you.
That's number one.
Number two, is that when people do come to you, let's say through
organic means through your content.
If you don't look at it on paper.
And what I mean by that is credible.
That you have in showing that you have experienced proof, this.
You know, signals.
And the signs that you are good at what you do.
So if your positioning is off, your credibility is off.
And there's nowhere that really tells your story, then it's
going to be really hard for.
People to trust you whether they came from a referral or not, especially as
a marketing consultant, but any kind of consultant, any kind of expert.
So you want to look really good on papers to that.
You're relevant to people that you want to serve and that when people refer people to
you, you are an obvious choice for them.
And when you go out and market yourself, you've reached out to
someone, you talk to someone.
That they look at you and say, if you look, you look exactly like what I'm
looking for, or at least pretty close, reasonably close to what I'm looking for.
So number one is looking good on paper and that that's really about positioning.
Around who your target market is.
Getting clear on what problem you help them solve.
And who you help solve it for their target market.
Um, two is the credibility to solve that How are you credible?
What's your story?
Why should I believe you can help me?
Why would I take a risk on working with you?
And that's a really big challenge that.
We all need to work on.
And, uh, that's, that's the underlying thing between, well, I look good on paper.
My positioning is really good.
Why aren't people hiring me?
Well, they just not, may not trust the credibility there.
They may not understand your experience, your track So
you want to prove it to them.
You want to show them.
Your.
Past projects you want to show testimonials, social
proof, that sort of thing.
Your story, your history, your experience, and your relevance to today's market, and
the way you do that is through content.
And we'll talk a little bit more about that as well.
So you want to look at on paper number
Number two is you want to have somewhere to invite people to.
And so.
In the book in the book, book yourself solid.
Uh, I think it's Michael port talks about.
It might be Porter.
Michael port, I believe talks about having a velvet rope policy.
And all that means is basically.
Biting people back to something that you own.
Ideally that's free and that's valuable.
Something you can continue the relationship with.
That doesn't, that's not an immediate sale.
So you come across your target market.
You want to, you want to overwhelm them in a positive way, not in an
overwhelming way, but you want to provide an abundance of value to them upfront.
And invite them back to it.
And that could look like a free community.
Or a paid community, but ideally there's a free component to this.
So you just you're casually.
You're not selling, you're just giving.
So come check out my website, come look at my podcast.
Join my mailing list.
I write daily.
Where I write weekly.
Pre free, valuable content.
Maybe it's a free course.
So you want to have something to offer?
And that's what we want to create some place to bring people back to
that you can continue the relationship with because most people won't be
ready to do business with you today.
Anyway.
But what you do want is for them to be exposed to your ideas.
That's the best way we can give people a sample of what it's like to work
with us is by sharing our ideas and.
And letting people taste them, try them on.
And so ideally that's free and ideally you're inviting people back to that
frequently and then you're offering it.
It's a way of value.
And my preferred method, all roads in my view should lead to
Rome, which is your mailing list.
That's your biggest asset.
That's where you'll sell more.
I'd rather have.
Uh, 5,000 people on my mailing list than 50,000 people on Twitter.
And I guarantee you, I would sell a lot more without email list size
versus the Twitter follower size.
And so that's the thing you'll own.
That's the permanent thing.
Everyone has email, we all check them multiple times a day.
Don't need to explain that to you.
But email is the crux of it.
A lot of people live on LinkedIn as their sole marketing strategy.
And that may work for you today.
And maybe it's worked for you for the last two, three years.
But your email.
You have to be thinking about getting people, incentivizing
people to come off of that platform.
Get on your mailing list or for you, it might be Twitter
or for you, it might YouTube.
I don't know.
Pick your thing.
But email is the place that you're going to own and that's where the
relationship's going to happen.
And you can then create content either on your website or just
send it out to your email.
I personally like to put it on my website and have that, send it to my email list.
And then distributed from there.
Maybe then I post an idea of it or part of it, or the whole thing on LinkedIn,
or republish it on medium or sub stock or wherever You can distribute it.
But ideally you want to look good on paper?
As you interact with people, which we'll talk about next, do you wanna invite them
back to something of value and you want, ideally get them on your mailing list
and then you want to incentivize that.
So you, so you can give away some free content free courses, that
Uh, but ideally that comes in exchange for an email.
Maybe not always, but sometimes.
Because without that email, you've lost the opportunity to serve people who aren't
ready But might be ready in five years and you can't really depend on them.
To follow you on LinkedIn, where they may or may not log in that day.
Everyone logs into email every
So emails where you want to go.
And we were framing this as.
Inviting them back to something, something of value.
And the best way to grow your email list that I've experienced.
And this is probably many is to offer some sort of upfront incentive.
Join my mailing list.
I'll give you my template and how to do X.
Join my mailing list to get a free five day email crash course in my case on
how to transition from execution to advise we were working in education.
That's that's kind of the promise and there's a crash course right on the
homepage that converts way better than.
If I just said dry my mailing list and I'll email you every day.
Because people don't really want more emails every day, but they want to
make, in my case, the transition from execution to advisory and education work.
So you want to send people back to something email, ideally, and
those can be community, your email, us podcasts, and our free content.
And of course,
So that's that.
So number one is looking on paper.
Number two is have somewhere to invite people to something of value.
And number three is you want to be thinking in terms of then, so
assuming you've kind of built this, like a, like a house or a cake you've
built the layers of foundation.
You have good stuff to invite people to.
Now you want to go out and open conversations.
Number three is about opening relationships and opening conversations.
So, what does that look like?
Well, number one is getting on social media and a lot
of people live on LinkedIn.
And that's a great place right now in the, in the B2B world.
Um, and for you, it might be Twitter.
Someone else might be Instagram or Facebook, whatever your core skills are.
You want to, you want to be opening relationships.
So what do you do?
So you publish on these platforms.
You, you.
Either distribute in part or in whole, the content that you're
producing on your website.
I do believe a lot of your content should org originate on your
website, live there as a permanent asset, and you can repurpose it
for other social media platforms.
Two, is it just engaging with people on their posts and just sort of following
your target market and being a member of the community with no real angle, just,
you know, you're publishing content.
You're also engaging with other people's content, which actually helps.
Typically helps the algorithm show more content of yours to other people
and all kinds of good stuff happened.
So it's not just karma, like good stuff happens when you engage with others.
And what you end up finding is that certain people will stand out.
Certain people will.
Well, interact with you more.
And those might be opportunities for people to put on a list and make
sure you see their posts so you can continue to engage with them further.
Or it might be that you email them or sorry, DM them on the
platform that they're on and just say, Hey, what are you working on?
Or, Hey, I love what you're doing.
And just chat with them.
To build a relationship because look, you may not get them as a client.
That's not your goal.
That's not why you DM people and people can feel it when you're trying to
slide into their DMS and get a sale.
But they may refer you to someone.
They may bring two or three friends to your thing that you might people
back to, to your mailing list, to your email, to your podcast.
And that's really critical is that word of mouth factor is going to be the thing
that's going to help you go much further.
You want your content to.
Speak to the people who are already bought into you and your ideas.
And then have them be promoters of your ideas, need to promote what
you're working on so that you grow through a lot of word of mouth.
So your marketing is a driver of word of mouth.
And we've seen in the data that I've talked about this in my trust.
The membership program that I run, uh, where we've analyzed our clients.
And a lot of people come from referrals, even if it's marketing.
That leads to that referral.
I think if I stopped marketing, I'd stopped getting referrals.
So we want to be opening relationships as pillar.
Number And we want to also be thinking in terms of, so yeah, social media,
DMS engagement, that sort of thing.
Um, but then also looking for who are the influencers in the space
who has audiences of the people that I want to interact with?
How do I open a relationship with them?
With no angle, no weirdness just, Hey, like what you're doing, looks
like we serve a similar audience.
Just thought I'd connect and say, Hey.
Big fan of your work.
How's it going?
And eventually that might lead to getting on one another's podcast or.
Maybe you do a webinar for their audience or.
Maybe, maybe they introduce you to people in their audience because you're
doing complimentary things that are non.
Non-competitive And so there's a lot of ways to benefit from that, but
that's what I call the golden goose strategy instead of looking for.
The individual golden eggs look for the golden goose.
Look for the people who aggregate the audience that you're trying to serve
and then try to serve those people.
And so I read a good book called Person of influence and I read it
twice and it was really, it was great.
I'm going to come back to it because I've forgotten more than I remember now,
but, and it wasn't that long ago, but there was a lot of good information.
But one of the things that we're saying is like, if you don't have.
Traction yet in your business.
One of the most important things you can be doing is building relationships
with the influential people in your niche and your target market.
So, um, we'll get into that further.
And I've talked about the golden goose strategy before, and it's
really fundamental in my view.
I think it's the most leveraged way to grow your business.
Getting on other people's podcasts, getting in front of
their community with a webinar.
I talk a lot about getting, doing webinars for SAS companies in your space.
So, and, you know, going to conferences, et cetera, et cetera.
So there's a lot of that.
So that's your whole goal is just to talk to people as Carl Richards
would say, play in traffic.
You know, get your word out there.
Make noise, talk, interact.
You never know who you're going to bump into and the whole goal.
Is just to open relationships and to develop them.
And you don't know what's going to lead And that goal.
Isn't a, like, you really can't be thinking transactionally or you have
to be thinking about relationships and how do I contribute and how do I
bring them and offer them something.
So as you're opening these relationships,
If they're a good fit, invite them into your community.
Invite them into your email list.
Tell them about a podcast episode that would relate perfectly to
what they're doing right now.
And just, Hey, I thought I'd send this to you.
This is Pretty much exactly what it sounds like you would benefit from.
Just wanted to share with you or share someone else's content, but have
somewhere to invite people back to.
And ideally you make your website compelling to them so that they
want to be on your email list.
You don't even have to sell it or push it very hard.
And so, you know, the last part would be maybe outreach.
So is there a way to reach out to people?
And say, Hey, you know, you're in my target market, except not those words.
Hey, I like what you're doing really big.
Find your I just thought I'd reach out and say, you're doing
a great job with your marketing.
Uh, if I can ever be of any assistance, let me know.
And sometimes that's enough to.
Start things off.
Uh, connecting with people on LinkedIn and having those kinds of
conversations and sometimes being a Not salesy, but Hey, I'm here.
If you need me, complimentary Um, And so there's other ways to do all
this stuff, but I just wanted to kind of give you the big buckets.
I teach more of this stuff and the mind share the mind trust, which
is the, the membership that I have.
And we talked about this at least once a month, about how to
grow and how to get new clients.
And we go into way more detail about it.
You're welcome to join if you want.
The whole point of it is like an exercise gym.
It's not the boring kind, but like more like a gymnastics gym.
I was talking to someone about this today.
And so everyone's there doing.
Exercise trying things out, playing, having fun.
You know, testing new ideas, implementing things.
And their business and then chatting with others about it.
And so that's the whole point.
It's like a place where you go and.
And, uh, you know, Enjoy.
The creative process that is creating your expertise business.
So I teach all that stuff in there.
We just opened up a new once a month.
We're going to have conversations around creating knowledge products.
So stay tuned for that.
Uh, it's an over enterprise.
So check that out if you want.
But.
This is my invitation to you.
And on a meta level to join a paid thing.
And so that's kind of your next level.
You're going to have things, you But in order for me to have permission
to invite you to pave thing, without feeling weird about it, I
need to give you something first.
And that's what we were talking about
So number one is looking at on paper.
Have a clear niche solve a queer problem.
Look, credible.
Prove your expert experience.
Show proof.
Demonstrate.
You know, the credibility of your offer of your ability to solve the
problem in as low risk as possible.
Include guarantees.
If you have to all those things to look good on paper.
On your website, ideally have someone to invite somewhere, to invite people, to and
give them an abundance of content, which is basically a sample of your expertise.
And if you've ever gone grocery shopping and tried something and then
You know how powerful samples can be.
So.
Invite people back to somewhere, look at on paper, invite people back to somewhere,
offer them an abundance of value.
Aimed open relationships.
I think longterm nothing's going to happen overnight.
You know, connect with people on social media, engage with people, comment.
Share.
DM people who are engaged with you.
See how they're doing.
Maybe they want to chat with you at a deeper level.
Just talk to people at the end.
People.
Um, look for those golden gooses.
Look for those influencers.
We'd key person of influence.
It's a great book.
Might help spawn some thinking around And do outreach of you have to.
Uh, I ideally don't want to live on the outreach.
Level, but if you've done the other things, right.
Outreach can work really well.
Hey, I've got a course on this.
Just one.
Just want to share with you.
It's.
It normally you.
Maybe it's just free and maybe you give it to your marketing manager or.
So-and-so and let them, let them do it.
It's there for you when you want and give, give, give, give.
That's it.
Those are the big three pillars.
And if you're missing any
Then there's going to be kind of holes there.
You're going to wonder why you're not getting traction.
A lot of people will focus too much on say LinkedIn or Twitter, and don't
really have a, say a web presence or don't have somewhere to invite people to.
And so there's not enough time, not enough ability to foster a relationship
on a platform you don't really own.
It takes a long, long time.
So really want to invite people in, give them a reason to get on your mailing list.
Ideally.
Uh, and then lead into other free stuff and then eventually.
You can tell them something, you can offer something, you
can invite them to a paid thing.
Like my membership.
Uh, and so that's it.
I just want to share that with you, if you're missing any of those, those
things, now's the time to do it.
Do you look at it on paper so that if I referred someone to
you in your target market, you'd be an obvious choice on paper.
And I would, de-risk my referral.
Cause at least you look at on paper, like no one ever got fired for RBM.
And then when they talk to you, do you have somewhere to invite
them to, to, to warm them up?
Because they're still a cool referral.
Cool.
Lead.
So, do you have a podcast?
Do you have a newsletter that's worth subscribing to that?
They have to subscribe I read almost daily.
And.
Yeah, that's part of the value prop.
I also have free content and that sort of thing
Um, do you have a podcast?
All that stuff do have a community.
You know, these things are easy to spin up, although.
Communities are for everyone.
And this is, it comes with the big caveat on the community side.
They're hard.
There are hard to manage that.
Take a lot of work.
Uh, and.
It's not a guarantee.
So.
Do you look it on paper?
Do you have someone invite them to, and are you It's
spending 30 to 50% of your week.
Looking for ways to open.
Relationships through distributing your content, connecting
with people on social media.
Creating direct message conversations.
Looking for golden gooses and ultimately reaching out to people in
your target market because you have the other pieces in place, but if you
only focus on opening relationships,
We're distributing your content then.
There's really no way to warm people up enough to drive them to a sale.
And so that's always going to be a struggle.
So all these things take time.
My friends.
And so don't wait until you're desperate.
Keep building, keep building your home, base your website.
Make it look super credible, super focused on your target market and
the problem you're trying to solve.
And make it abundantly full of content so that people have a reason to stick around.
And, you know, the content is.
Is free, but the implementation.
The system is what people pay you for.
Helping them actually get it done in an organized way.
So hope that helps some friends.
Those are the three pillars of marketing as I see them that I miss anything,
obviously there's way more, but I think these are the big three buckets for
That's all I'll talk to you soon