Marketing tips Marketing help

Flip your business

By Jim Connolly | November 17, 2023

Did you know, the massive majority of small businesses are built on an ineffective, upside down model?

It looks like this.

The business owner decides the type of service they’re going to offer.
They then try to find clients for their service.

That’s nuts!

It can’t work in any meaningful way.

Why?

Because it’s literally the wrong way round. The most effective business owners do the exact opposite.

Here’s what they do

They decide the kind of clients they want to work with. For example, clients who are happy to pay a premium fee for a premium service, clients who demand the fastest possible service or maybe clients who value a no-frills service.
Then, and only then, they decide what services to offer. The service is based around the things, which their ideal profile of client will value and desire. And it works like a magnet!
They then market this service exclusively to these targeted prospective clients. They shun everyone else.
And it works spectacularly well.

If you struggle to attract the right kind of clients, I strongly recommend you consider flipping your business model around.

Focus on the kind of clients you most want to work with. Then, consider rebuilding your services so that those ideal clients will find it extremely attractive. Delight these ideal clients and not only will they hire you, they’ll tell their friends.

On a personal note: I built my own business on this model. As a result I work with fantastic clients every day. And over 90% of them come from client referrals.

It’s far, far, far more effective than trying to sell people a service that wasn’t specifically built around their needs, and is similar to what your competitors are already offering them.

Photo by John Fornander

New is getting old

By Jim Connolly | November 9, 2023

marketing risk, new, change, fear of change

When it comes to creating a powerful marketing message and attracting customers, the word ‘new‘ is overrated. New is a very loaded word and can destroy your marketing results.

There are 3 broad reasons for this.

The newest product or service is always a riskier bet. At best, it’s a bigger gamble than the trusted incumbent. At worst, the customer feels like a paying guinea pig.
The newest product or service is seldom the best. It lacks the improvements that come from years of feedback. It lacks the robustness that comes from stress-testing.
New doesn’t last for long. This makes it a short-term marketing message. Anything that’s new is only new for now.

A dozen better alternatives

Given the challenges of using the word new, I recommend you replace it with something more compelling. More motivating. More attractive. To get you started, here are 12 alternatives.

A faster way.
A more enjoyable way.
A cleaner way.
A proven way.
A stylish way.
An profitable way.
A premium quality way.
An ethical way.
An exciting way.
A safer way.
A more reliable way.
A cost effective way.

What next?

Take a look through your marketing and search for opportunities to replace new with a better alternative. This is usually in situations where new is used as the only adjective.

Also, you can apply this to your presentations, negotiations or meetings. For example, if you’re trying to sell a new product, service or idea to someone, they’re more likely to pay attention when you tell them about your ‘more profitable way’ of doing something, than your ‘new way’ of doing something.

Finally, in situations where you need to use the word new, such as a press release or product launch, combine it with another word. For example, new and improved.

Photo by Werner Du plessis

Did you see what those liars are saying?

By Jim Connolly | November 7, 2023

Have you ever looked at the marketing promises made by your competitors?

Your most unreliable competitors will promise to deliver on time, every time.
Your lowest quality competitors will promise premium quality at low prices.
Your least competent competitors will promise a highly professional service.

And they’ll all have testimonials. Testimonials that are often the opposite of what a real client or customer will experience from them.

It’s horrible. It sucks. But it makes sense

After all, they’re hardly likely to admit that working with them or buying from them is a total nightmare. You see, the mindset that says it’s okay to produce low quality work and charge over the odds for it, has no problem being dishonest in other areas of their business.

What does this have to do with you?

Everything!

It has everything to do with you. And here’s why.

Your prospective clients or customers have been lied to before. This means the claims you legitimately make in YOUR marketing will only be treated seriously, if you back them up.

Here are a couple of tips to help you make the truth of your marketing a lot more believable.

One way to add credibility, is to link from your website to external sources. For example, link from your website to external reviews or positive media coverage. Similarly, if you’ve been accredited by a respected organisation, link to the page on their website, where you’re mentioned.

Another way to add credibility, is to turn up regularly with useful information, via a newsletter, a blog, a podcast or on social networks, etc. By providing genuinely useful, informed advice, you demonstrate your knowledge. By doing this regularly, you show your reliability. This also gives you an opportunity to show your personality. By demonstrating your knowledge and allowing your marketplace to get to know you, you create a potent marketing mix that really helps you to build trust.

Please don’t just find this advice interesting.

Do something with it.

When the economy is in bad shape, people think a lot harder before making any investments. This includes investing in the services or products you provide. Showcase your credibility and make the decision to invest in you as easy as possible.

How to turn your customers, clients and prospects into fans

By Jim Connolly | November 4, 2023

Without doubt, customer experience is one of the most powerful forms of marketing. Here’s a look at why, plus some examples to help your business create an outstandingly valuable experience for your customers.

Let’s go!

customer experience, marketing, word of mouth

Isn’t it just another name for customer service?

Customer experience is a term often used incorrectly. Some use it interchangeably with customer service, but they’re very different things.

Customer service is about the quality of service you provide to your customers.
Customer experience is about the feelings your customers experience when they do business with you.

When deployed correctly, your customer experience becomes a powerful marketing asset. It’s an experience your customers will value enormously. An experience they’ll talk about and share with their friends and contacts. And an experience that will make them fiercely loyal customers.

That’s why I strongly recommend you embrace it and optimize it. To get your creative juices flowing, here are a couple of very different types of business, who provide an equally wonderful experience for their customers.

Customer experience in diverse businesses

1. A vinyl record store: When you visit a store that sells vinyl records, you notice something. Customers don’t simply walk in, ask for what they want and leave. No. It’s an experience. Customers connect with the staff and other customers, who are also fellow vinyl lovers. They talk about new releases, decks and cabling, etc. They listen to music.

It’s where they buy music and related hardware. But it’s so much more than that. It’s an enjoyable experience.

2. My dentist: Yes, it applies to every type of business, including dentists. I enjoy visiting them for my check-up. I look forward to it because it’s an excellent experience. The staff are friendly, welcoming and clearly love working there. The premises are creatively designed to be relaxing, but also to make it easy for patients to chat. The ambience is outstanding. Utterly unlike any other dental practice I’ve ever used.

I’ve lived in my area for over 20-years and I’ve never seen them advertise. Their patients do that for them, willingly, for free.

If visiting a dentist can be that great a customer experience, yours certainly can.

Your customer experience

I’ve seen amazing examples in every industry and profession. It works in your line of business, too.

What next?

Here’s a useful way to get started. List all the providers that you enjoy the experience of doing business with. Then look for what makes it so good. Write it down. Unpack it.

Now work on how to apply the very best from those experiences, in order to create an amazing customer experience of your own.

Photo by Count Chris

Set your business free from this limiting belief

By Jim Connolly | November 3, 2023

With 2024 less than 2 months away, I’d like to help you overcome one of the biggest barriers to business success. If you do, you’ll set yourself up for an amazing year ahead.

Ready?

Then lets go my friend.

It starts with one of the biggest paradoxes in business. The only way to succeed more often, is to increase your failure rate. (I’ll give you 3 examples of why this is provably correct in a moment).

The challenge here, is that many small business owners have not yet figured this out. They avoid taking action on their ideas, unless they are convinced, in advance, the idea will work out exactly how they want it to.

That’s an exceptionally high bar to set. So they tend to leave most of their ideas on the drawing board. Including the ideas that would have made them a fortune.

Broadly speaking, there are only three potential outcomes after you take action on a business idea. And you can benefit massively from all three of them.

It might work out just how you wanted, right out the box! A quick win. An instant hit.
It might work later, after you make some adjustments. By putting an idea into action, you attract feedback. Feedback allows you to tweak and improve. And improvements lead to success.
It might flop. If it does, you get to learn from it and invest that learning into future opportunities. These failure lessons help you build an invaluable reservoir of feedback, which leads to better and better decision making. This is how ALL ongoing success happens.

When you fully understand the value of feedback, it becomes a lot easier to take action with your ideas and insights. That’s because you will have eliminated any irrational fear of failure. Just like every successful business owner before you.

Failure is feedback.

And feedback is your friend.

Reject the mob. Here’s why!

By Jim Connolly | November 1, 2023

Here’s a very straightforward, proven way to build a successful service-based business. I’m going to suggest you reject the mob.

All right. That’s the intro finished. Let’s go!

Depending on the service you provide and your location, there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of prospective clients.

Except, they’re not really your prospective clients at all.

No.

Whilst you may be able to provide a degree of service to some of them, for the vast majority you won’t be exactly what they’re looking for. You can’t possibly be. None of us can.

After all.

Some will want a more local provider.
Some will demand the lowest priced provider.
Some will insist on the absolute premium, and happily pay the maximum to ensure it.
Some will need a provider that speaks a certain language.
Some will be looking for a provider from one of their networking groups.
Some will want a provider with a rare, highly specialist knowledge.
Some will require a provider who charges annually in arrears.
Some will only hire a provider with offices in multiple locations.
Some will want unlimited phone access at no extra charge.

Given you can’t possibly serve the majority of your marketplace, I have a strong recommendation for you. I recommend you adopt a much more focused strategy.

Here’s why. Along with how it works.

Reject the mob

The temptation is to try and have as wide an appeal as possible, so you get a shot at as many prospective clients as possible. That’s a very common approach. It seems to make sense, but it’s completely wrongheaded. A bad mindset to work from. And a very expensive mistake.

Why?

Because by trying to be somewhat relevant to everyone, you fail to be directly relevant to anyone – including your actual prospects.

Your actual (genuine) prospects need to see your marketing and immediately identify that you’re talking to them. By weakening that message, you lose them.

They’ll assume you’re not what they’re looking for, when you’re exactly what they’re looking for and exactly what they need.

So my plea to you is simple.

Reject the mob. They’re not interested. They’ll waste your time. They’ll want ‘this’ when you offer ‘that’. And you’ll go nuts trying to make them happy, let alone keep them happy.

Embrace your actual prospects instead

Focus on being directly rele v ant to the prospective clients you can absolutely delight with your services. These are the people who will hire you, pay you the correct rate, recommend you to their friends and stay with you for years and years. These are the clients you can confidently build an amazingly successful business with.

These are the clients you need. And they need you. They really need you!

Now, go and let them know! Focus all your marketing, so that it’s strikingly obvious you’re exactly what they’ve been looking for.

The easy switch: Attract clients like a magnet

By Jim Connolly | October 30, 2023

Photo by Ave Calvar on Unsplash

To start the week, I’m going to share an extremely powerful marketing tip with you. It’s something that the vast majority of your competitors either won’t be doing correctly or won’t be doing at all. Get it right and you’ll give yourself a massive competitive advantage.

It starts with this fundamental truth.

People, including your prospective clients, universally HATE the hassle associated with switching providers.

Think about it.

I’m willing to guess that you and I probably have at least one current provider, who isn’t ideal. Their charges may have increased, with no meaningful increase in the value we get from them. Maybe they’re slow to respond when we contact them for support. Perhaps they’re not as interested in dealing with our problems, as they used to be. And we’re pretty darn sure that there are better providers out there.

So, why do we stay with an under performing provider?

We stay, for the same reason your prospective clients have stayed with their current provider.

It’s simply this.

Switching providers is risky

People are hardwired to intentionally avoid risk. And because switching to a new provider feels risky, we tend to avoid it.

Yes, YOU know there’s no risk whatsoever in switching to you from their current provider. You know that you’ll look after them better than they could dream of, because you’re capable, reliable, trustworthy and honest.

But THEY don’t know that!

What’s the answer?

Make switching stress free and easy

The proven solution to this problem is something I call The Easy Switch. It’s a strategy where you make it as easy as possible for prospects to switch to you. It requires a two pronged approach.

1. Showcase your trust assets.
Make it as easy as possible for prospective clients to see for themselves, why they should trust you. You do this using your trust assets; things that help establish you as a safe, low-risk option for them.

Your trust assets might include providing them with a list of your success and achievements. You can also highlight the promises and guarantees you offer, along with testimonials you have from extremely happy clients. And if you’ve been in your current line of business for a long time, don’t keep it a secret. Include that, too.

2. Make switching to you as simple as possible.
This is the most important part. Even after trust has been established, the perceived challenges involved and the time required in order to switch providers is enough to put people off.

Some providers use a version of the lock in effect / vendor lock in, where they deliberately make moving from them as hard as they can, for their clients. This is a huge problem in some industries, but less of a problem in others.

Regardless, you need to make the switch to you as frictionless, uncomplicated and stress-free as possible.

The best providers have a client transition process in place, where someone from their team manages the whole process for new clients. They stay in close contact with the new client to answer questions, overcome issues with the former provider and offer all the help they can. I do this with my new clients and I very strongly advise you to do the same.

Show them how easy it is to switch to you

Once you’ve addressed those two parts of the switching process, it’s really important to let your prospective clients know. It needs to feature very prominently in your marketing, especially if you’re in an industry that’s known for making it hard to switch. It needs to be a key point in your conversations with prospective clients.

Equipped with visible trust assets and an equally visible strategy to make switching to you an absolute breeze, you become a much more attractive choice for prospective clients.

You will become the natural choice. The stress-free choice. And for many, you will become the only choice.

Closing for business? Let’s look at closing the sale

By Jim Connolly | October 25, 2023

Marketing, closing the sale, closing sales, the close, closing technique

Photo by Finn Hackshaw on Unsplash

When I started out in sales and marketing, it was all about closing the sale.

In fact, good salespeople were often referred to as good closers.

Decades later, I still see sales recruiters asking for candidates who have a proven record of closing.

Here’s why you need to be extremely careful, before using any of the countless closing techniques and tricks.

Closing for business?

The challenge with the closing mindset, is that it positions the prospective customer as little more than an obstacle. A barrier between you and the sale. An hurdle to be overcome. It’s little wonder so many closing techniques are based on aggressive, psychological tactics.

Here are a couple of the worst, widely used examples today.

The silence close. This is where a series of long, uncomfortable silences are used at key points in the sales process. The person selling uses this discomfort to exert the maximum mental pressure on the prospective client. It’s borrowed from interrogation techniques!
Assuming the sale. This is where the person selling literally ignores the prospect’s total lack of interest and acts as if the prospect has agreed to make the purchase. They just start asking for the delivery address and a suitable date. When/if the prospect objects, the salesperson responds with a series of why? questions, further pressuring the prospect.

In a nutshell, the focus is on outmanoeuvring your opponent. It’s them against you. A confrontation.

Here’s a very different approach, along with why I strongly recommend you use it.

Opening

I built my reputation in sales by adopting the total opposite approach. Instead of focusing on closing, I focused on opening. And I made a fortune.

Opening?

Yes. Opening relationships and opening opportunities. I found the idea of closing to be self-defeating. I discovered that you can achieve a great deal more, by opening relationships with people. This means taking time to listen to them. And then learning about their challenges and what they want or need. If our marketing is targeted correctly, we’re automatically only speaking with people who are our ideal profile of client.

When handled correctly, and preceded with effective marketing, this means there’s no need to close anything or close on anyone.

The whole process becomes a natural, flowing conversation, where we seek to help people overcome a challenge, with the products or services we provide.

It’s an effective, rewarding and professional way to achieve amazing sales results, and build masses of high-value relationships that last.

Too passive?

No way! This approach may sound passive, but consider the people YOU like. The people you trust. The vendors you’re already purchasing from. Are they pushy? Are they confrontational? No! That’s because we avoid people like that. Conversely, we’re attracted to those who respect us and are open and honest with us.

We trust people who are open and honest.

We buy from people who are open and honest.

We value people who are open and honest.

We recommend people who are open and honest.

In short, the more open we are, the more opportunities we’re open to, the more sales we make and then, the more referrals we receive.

Within seconds

By Jim Connolly | October 17, 2023

Photo by Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash

One of the best-known sayings in business is, time is money. Business owners tend to say this when referring to the financial value of their time. And rightly so. However, there’s another reason why time is money for you as a business owner. Today, I’ll explain what it is and why it’s critically important to your sales and marketing results.

Let’s go.

Many important decisions your prospective client or customer will make, are well on their way to being made within seconds.

Think about it.

Open an email and within seconds, you’ll decide if it’s important or junk.
Enter any store and within seconds, you’ll get a feel for whether the place is likely to be expensive, bargain basement, successful, quiet, independent, local, national chain, aimed at a certain age-range and so on.
Read the title of an article or newsletter and within seconds, you’ll decide to read it or scroll past it.
Talk with a service provider and within seconds, you’ll start deciding if they’re professional or not.
Read the marketing messages of any company and within seconds, you’ll have a good idea if their product or service is suitable for you.
Return a faulty product to a store, and within seconds you’ll know how helpful or accommodating they’re likely to be.

In the same way that you and I start to form our opinions within seconds, so do your prospects. That’s why you need to create a strong first impression.

Here’s a useful way to get started

Take some time to consider what you want your prospects to feel about your business, in order for them to buy from you or hire you. Universally, you will need prospects to feel they can trust you and regard you as professional. Other feelings will vary depending on your industry, the type of prospects you seek to serve and the way you’ve positioned your business. For some of you that will be exciting, creative, cutting edge and dynamic. For others that will be safe, consistent, secure and established. Or anything in-between.

Then think of all the places where your prospects are likely to encounter you or your business. The places where initial opinions are formed within seconds. For example; on your website, at your premises, on your social media accounts, at a networking group, through an advertisement, on a webinar, at a conference or event, etc. Make a list. Write it down.

At this point you know how you want your prospects to feel, and the places where they’re likely to encounter you.

It’s now time to check out how consistent your business/brand is with those feelings, in those places. Anything that’s inconsistent needs to be removed, or replaced with a consistent alternative. As you go through this process in each of the relevant places, you’ll make it easier and easier for prospects to choose your business.

And remember, your prospects are already forming their initial impressions of you and your business, regardless. So take control. Help them to feel that you’re exactly what they’re looking for. The best fit. The obvious choice.