Jim's Marketing Blog

Have you ever had clients, who refused to pay you on time?  If you have, you may find this post extremely useful!

Marketing and cash flow

The easiest way to avoid these low-value clients from hurting your business, is not to work with them in the first place.  I have not had a late payer in 15 years, because I don’t target those idiots with my marketing.  As a direct result, the clients I attract are people like you; professional people who don’t accept services, knowing they can’t pay for them.  If you want to attract great clients, read this!

Make no mistake, those selfish bastards will ruin you, if you decide to work with them.  The reality is that more businesses go broke because of bad cash flow, than because of a lack of earnings.

I was prompted to write this post, after a wonderful person who wanted to work with me lost her place, because of money owed to her, which was massively overdue.  She has lost an amazing opportunity, all because a major client of hers decided (yet again) that he was going to make her wait months and months and months for money he owes her.  She believes she needs his business.  I believe she doesn’t.  No one needs clients like that.

Professional marketing repels deliberate late payers

Professional marketing includes setting the scene with prospective clients, so they know what to expect when working with you.  This includes making it clear, that you are not prepared to work with deliberate late payers.  Deliberate late payers are those people, who have the funds to pay you, but elect not to; either as a power trip or because THEY think YOU are just not important enough. Let me reiterate: I’m not referring to someone, who is very occasionally a little late paying you.  I’m talking about those who believe it’s perfectly OK to deliberately withhold your money.  I have met many hard working people, who went broke thanks to deliberate late payers starving them of essential cash flow.

You don’t lose anything of value, by repelling those assholes before they can hurt your business.  In fact, it is impossible to grow a successful business, working with deliberate late payers.  They kill your finances, drain your energy and leave you unable to invest in the essential services your business needs, in order to grow.

Developing a great client base of people who value you, respect you and PAY you, is one of the best reasons to invest in professional marketing.

Are we blocking our own success, without even knowing it?

I speak with business owners all the time, who work long hours; yet because their mindset is wrong, they make little meaningful progress.  To explain what I mean, I want you to consider the following question.  It’s a question that we all ask ourselves, usually unconsciously.  Your answer will show what your current mindset is and whether it’s likely to work for you or against you.  Here’s the question:

Do you do whatever is required, to make your business as successful as it can possibly be OR do you do less than you’re capable of and just see what happens?

The mindset that crushes businesses (and dreams)

Many business owners, most of them in fact, do far less than they are truly capable of.  They never invest their full potential into their business.

Their mindset, is that they should hold back.  They often work long hours, but they work those hours doing the stuff they are comfortable with.  Only during times of crisis, are they prepared to crank it up a gear or two.  Then, once the crisis is averted, they go back onto autopilot.  In essence, these business owners only work with the correct mindset, when they have a problem.

The mindset of success

A far smaller group of business owners, decide to do everything they can in order to succeed.  They are curious to learn just what they are capable of.

Their mindset, if that doing just enough is never enough.  They constantly wonder; how far can I take this? Their passion and energy is contagious.  It not only powers them forward, it encourages others to join them and invest in their ideas.  This mindset is shared by every high achieving person I have ever met.

The fear of failure guarantees failure

It’s often said that the fear of failure is what stops people from really giving their all.  I have never understood the logic, but it suggests that by not putting everything we can into our business, we can console ourselves by saying; “well, I wasn’t REALLY trying!”, if that business then fails.

Here’s the problem with that approach:  The odds on us just coasting along, then suddenly being interrupted by success, are zero.  We must invest everything into our businesses, even the things we find challenging, if we want our business to deliver the rewards and lifestyle, which we want for our families and ourselves.  No one coasts their way to success.

Today, choose to give your business everything you can.

Then tomorrow, do the same.

If you are going to get stuck in a rut, make it this rut!

Here’s a message of genuine, authentic, real-world hope:

Everything you have right now, from the tangible to the intangible, is there because of who you are.  To change your circumstances, you need to change yourself.

The lesson here is magical.  It offers us real hope.  No matter how bad things are, this fundamental truth assures us that by becoming more than we are, we can have more than we have.  But the process always starts with us.

I know from the emails I receive, that many of you are going through extremely tough times right now.  Please, never, ever give up.

If you are going without in any area of your life right now, the answer is to look within.

Everything you do or neglect to do, has an impact on your business.

The impact is always positive or negative.  Nothing in business is neutral.  A casual remark, the decision not to attend a meeting, a quick email or social media update  – All of these will impact your business, to a lesser or greater extent.  Everything counts.

Here’s what my mentor, Jim Rohn, used to say:

Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.

Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don’t fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.

The simple things you do every day are far more likely to influence your eventual outcome, than the less frequent major decisions you apply so much thought to.  Get the basics right and repeat them every day.

So simple.

So magical.

So easy to do.

So easy to ignore.

How hard do you look for the gold, in the challenges that face your business?

Most people experience a problem and then dig around until they get it resolved.

Smart people experience a problem and then get the help they need to quickly solve it.  This is faster and the solution is usually far better too.

Super-smart people experience a problem and then get the help they need to quickly solve it.  They then look for the gold. It’s this final step, looking for the gold, which makes all the difference to their results!

Commercial gold dust

There are very few, if any, business problems, which do not come with some kind of valuable lesson.  When we look for the lesson and then learn from it, it’s like finding gold.  These lessons are of enormous value and combine to help us develop a golden reserve of essential knowledge.  This knowledge can then be invested into helping us make better and better decisions, which is the starting point of our commercial progress.

Compare that approach to those whose businesses reach a plateau, because they keep repeating the same errors.  They make no real progress, because they fail to learn.  They don’t look for the golden lessons, they prefer to blame their luck and other people, for their lack of success.  For example, they blame lousy customers for being a pain in the ass to work with, rather than looking at why their marketing attracted that lousy customer and why they were unable to see that the person was unsuitable.  It’s never their fault, so they learn nothing and repeat the same frustrating errors.

All the time we are learning, we have the opportunity to improve; to be more than we are today.  That’s where the gold is!Photo: Brian Giesen

Whenever I announce some kind of major breakthrough result, I always get people asking me:

“What’s the secret Jim?”

Sometimes they ask this on Twitter; expecting me to be able to condense an extremely powerful marketing strategy, into 140 characters! (Yes I am serious)

When I answer these questions, I explain that the breakthrough came as a result of smart marketing and hard work.  The response then is usually:

“But was there one key thing you did that did the trick?”

At that point, my hand slaps my forehead as I witness yet another person, who is still wasting their time, waiting for magic fixes and silver bullets to turn their results around!  They are waiting for the sexy answer, not the right answer.

You increase your sales figures, boost your profits and achieve the quality of life you want, by successfully marketing a great product or service.  You can waste a lot of money and years of your life, believing in the concept that some miracle business generation scheme or magical trick will transform your sales results.  You have to be smarter than that.

If you are genuinely serious about making your business work, you need to know what to do and how to do it correctly.  In other words, you need professional help.  You can contact me, you can call someone else, but don’t just carry on wasting time.  The clock is ticking.  There are only so many days someone can waste, before it’s too late to turn things around.

You achieve the magic, by NOT using tricks

The trick is that there are no tricks.  I don’t have any silver bullets, but with great marketing and mentoring, my clients see real magic. That’s because in real life, the people who achieve stunning, bankable results don’t use tricks or quick fixes.

For example, one of my clients earned more last month, than in her best 6 months before she worked with me.  That’s truly magical.  Another client has seen his training business increase it’s income by 300% and his profits by closer to 450%, at a time when his competitors are going broke!  That’s truly magical.  No magic tricks, just the result of us working together, and me providing a clear plan, which I coach them through; giving them clarity, focus and progress.

The bottom line:  Avoid the schemes and the silver bullet merchants and do the right things, correctly.  That’s what we do and it works extremely well!

Some people just don’t get it.

You know the people I mean, right?

• They know there’s a heatwave coming days in advance, yet they wait until it arrives before they shop for a fan.  They then find empty shelves, as they go from shop to shop in the blazing sun.
• They know the best theatre seats always sell first, yet they book their theatre tickets late and end up with the worst seats.
• They know garden centres are packed solid on a spring weekend, but they refuse to visit them midweek.  End result, they waste an hour or more doing what they could have done in 10 minutes after work, midweek.  They also miss the healthiest plants and the best deals, as these are always sold first.

When my mentor, Jim Rohn, started out, he told himself;

I will get everyone in this room to understand my message, even if it kills me.

He then confessed;

I had to stop.  I almost died!

No matter what line of business you are in, you have to learn to live with the fact that a subset of people will never “get it.”  In my experience, you are better off leaving those guys to your competitors.  I know what you are thinking; it’s OK for Connolly saying that, but I can’t afford to be so choosy!

Wrong! You can’t afford to waste your time and resources, trying to sell to people who are not interested.  It’s the lowest leverage form of marketing and the most expensive way to acquire clients.  It’s the total opposite of targeted marketing, where we deliberately look for the right profile of client.

Target your marketing toward people who have the need, resources and intelligence to work with you.  If you are reading this, I know you are an intelligent business owner, who understands the value of marketing – otherwise you wouldn’t be here!  That’s because my marketing is targeted, so that I only get inquiries from people like you – The kind of people I love to work with and who “get it!”  If you want to know how I target my marketing so effectively, read this as I explain everything!

To get the best results, your marketing needs to focus your resources on the right section of the marketplace, based on your ideal client profile.  Small business owners just don’t have the time to waste, chasing the wrong people.

One of the most common questions I see people asking online, is why do some people fall for those scam ebooks, which promise to make them rich?  They are clearly bullshit, so how come people buy them?

There are 2 reasons these books sell, even though they are obviously bogus.

1. They are not aimed at you

Those ebooks are designed to convince people, who are a lot less savvy than you.  People like you don’t buy those books, because you can see through the BS.  However, like all successfully marketed products, those get rich quick books have their marketing designed to appeal to a niche, target market.  Their target market is people who are desperate and ill-informed.  Thus, their marketing message is designed for people like them, not people like you, which is why you can see right through it.

2. They offer hope

Those books offer hope, albeit false hope, to people who are often in hopeless situations.  When people have debts, with no sign of money on the horizon and a family to look after, they will often act irrationally.  In an effort to find a way out, a $30 ebook promising to make them rich or give them a few grand a month, is suddenly an option that they will consider.

Once they are in that frame of mind, there’s a very good chance they will buy the book.  They see the fake testimonials and fake bank statements and actually want to believe them.  At that point, they are looking for reasons to proceed, so that’s what they see.  They need hope and the ebook offers it to them.

It’s easy to be harsh on people who waste their money on these scams, but sadly there are a lot of people out there right now looking for a way out of debt and financial hardship.  Being broke is bad enough, but the feeling of being broke and knowing you just wasted another $30 on a scam must feel awful.

The best we can do, is share some free education (like this post) and hope it helps people think a little harder, before they part with their money for crap, at a point when they can least afford to.

I wrote a post on Wednesday about the poor customer service experience I had with phone manufacturer, HTC.  In the post, I promised that I would update you and let you know if HTC responded or not.

Despite that post making it to the first page of Google, for anyone in the UK searching for HTC customer service, and me pinging / tracking back to their website from the post, no one from HTC has been in touch.

As the core issue I had with them was directly related to the way they communicated with me online, it’s not that surprising that they either don’t monitor mentions of their brand online, or that they simply chose not to communicate.

Thanks to everyone who responded to me, both on that post and via social media, about the wider topic of the value of good customer service.  It’s great that something positive has come from such a disappointing experience.

A guy called me once and asked:

“Jim, we want to market our new service with a huge launch event.  Can you help us?”

I answered:

“I think what you want is to successfully market your new service?  I can certainly help with that, but to simply build a huge launch event would be a waste of your money and my time.”

Like many business owners, he was looking for the right answer to the wrong question.  He was focused on making the launch as big and attention grabbing as possible, rather than looking at how his new service could be marketed as successfully as possible.  He had sidelined an amazing 60% of his annual marketing budget, for the 24 hour launch period.  That’s not a wise move!

Why?

Because the success of his business will not be determined by how much money he spends on the launch day.  Whilst the coverage he could buy with that money might make him feel better, as Seth Godin explained, it’s not necessary.  Blowing all that money on day one is extremely unlikely to have any lasting impact on his business whatsoever; other than robbing it of essential funds during it’s toughest year.

When I explain this process to people, I often compare it to a lavish wedding!

A good lesson from a bad marriage

Think about it: Many failed marriages start off with an enormous, extravagant wedding day.  However, it’s not the big day, which determines the success of the marriage or now.  A marriage succeeds or fails based on what happens AFTER the confetti has been swept up and everyone has gone home.  Business is just the same.  It’s what happens on a day to day basis that will determine its future.

Certainly, it’s a good idea to celebrate the launch of a new project and ask people you respect if they want to join in and share the news.  But to blow so much money on that one day, makes little sense.

If you want to make real progress with your business, you need to know where you are right now in all the key areas.  This means studying the numbers.  The challenge here, is that whilst many of us know what the numbers behind our business are, we don’t always know what they represent in real terms.

We need to add context to the numbers if we want to benefit from what they are telling us.

2 is a small number, sometimes!

I remember hearing a friend tell me that there were only 2 things that she didn’t like about her job.  When you think about it, that sounds pretty impressive.  After all, there are hundreds of elements to a job, right?

She then told me what those 2 things were and it painted a very different picture.  The 2 things she didn’t like were:

1. The people she worked with
2. The company’s products

Numbers need context

Small business owners often obsess about their numbers, without focusing on the context and what the numbers actually mean to them.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.  I’ve often heard people brag about the Google Page Rank of their company website or blog, without looking to see what that Page Rank number actually means for their business, in real terms.  For instance, a high Page Rank, on a site with a poorly targeted readership, who seldom make business inquiries, is nothing to brag about.  It’s actually a problem in urgent need of fixing.

Similarly, a business owner with a large social network may have the numbers to impress people, yet get little real value from their thousands of followers and friends.  If they focus on the numbers, rather than the people behind those numbers, they miss everything that matters.

When context is applied, a person with a small, well connected social network may well be getting massively better results, than the “social media rock star” with thousands of people, who are distant and seldom connect with them.

The numbers are a vital part of business.  In fact, without knowing all the important numbers, you can not succeed.  This is why I believe we all need to set some time aside to learn what the message is, behind all the key numbers in our business, from the most obvious numbers; profits, turnover, cash flow etc, to the less obvious.

The next time someone asks you for a quote, remember to give them the full answer.  This means covering the following 2 areas:

1. Tell them what your fee or price is.
2. THEN tell them the value you bring.

Here’s why this matters

• If you simply give them the first answer, they will see the cost of hiring you or buying from you.
• If you give them the first and second answer, you are no longer a cost, but an investment.

For example, an accountant may decide to quote her fee to a prospective client, at which point the client looks at the fee and compares it to the other fees they have had quoted.  Alternatively, that accountant can quote her fee, and demonstrate how she saved a client 20k in 12 months.  Now, the accountant is showing the value of investing in her services specifically.  You’d be crazy not to hire her!

In short:  Never quote a fee, with a list of generic benefits.   Always show your prospective clients what they get in return for working with YOU.  This way, you become an investment and make it a lot easier for people to see your amazing value.

If you want more free help in getting your prices or fees right, read this post!