Successful Blog

How Do You Get the First Client? Five Critical Steps

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No Tells Us That

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As I talk to new entrepreneurs, I find that one burning problem is their biggest frustration.
The problem cuts to the basics of growing a thriving business. It applies every business online and offline. It’s the most important question and the one that least often gets mentioned.

The problem came up in a conversation I had at SOBCon NW in Portland. The conversation went like this …

Me: Did you get a chance to talk to AJ about his business?
New Entrepreneur: Yes.
Me: So, it seems like what he’s doing correlates well to where you want to be.
New: Yeah. True. He told me a lot about where I want to be, but what I want to know know is …

What did he do in the first six months? How did he get his first client?

5 Critical Steps to Getting Your First Client

We can know we’re good at something, but not believe it. We can know our expertise, but not have the previous clients to show that we can deliver. That gap can seem like the difference between hugely succeeding and falling into the abyss in which our rent goes unpaid and we find ourselves looking in the mirror wondering what were we thinking?

People say a leap of faith and a lot of passion will get you there, but we’ve all seen faith filled passionate action go crashing. Here are the five critical steps to making that first client happen with less risk and exponentially more chance of success.

  1. Decide on a job description that fits you. Rather than reconfigure yourself to fit a pothole or a problem, figure out what you’re most suited to be going. Your past successes will tell you what you’re good at. look for the crossroads of your [expertise, experience, talent and skillsets] and your [favorite ideas, people, enchantments, and work-like things that you find fun.]

    I see and connect things differently and with great speed. I tear ideas apart and put them together in old ways and new ways and adjust them faster, easier, and more meaningfully for any audience you put in front of me. My successes all included leveraging opportunity, traditional teaching, innovative thinking, strategy, business growth, strong networks, branding, marketing, and community building and I loved doing all of it.

    Job description: I use opportunity thinking and relationship strategies to connect businesses with their customers in irresistible ways. [No, I never actually say that. Who actually recites their job description? Still it’s good to know it.]

  2. Define at least one clear, concrete offer that you know in your bones you can deliver — in case someone asks you. A job description or even an elevator pitch is not an offer. An offer is a defined, discrete, reasonable, work transaction that can be presented for acceptance.

    An offer: I offer a 2.5 hour workshop called, “Who’s Talking about You?” In the ideal scenario, it’s three parts:

    1. 45 minute presentation with Q&A
    2. 30 minutes of teamwork to immediately explore the information and set it to action
    3. 30 minutes of building on what the teams have recommended to give feedback and apply the concepts teams have been exploring even more deeply
  3. Identify the people who already have an interest in you and the kinds of things you do. Reach the reachable. The goal is one first client.

    4. Value their attention. Listen to what they’re saying.
    Value the time they spend. Get to know what they invest their time in.
    Value their time when they listen to what you’re saying. With that in mind …

  4. Don’t ask how you can help! That question makes the conversation about you not them. When someone I’ve never worked with asks, “How can I help?” the best answer I can give is “I don’t know.” The question itself puts the burden of thinking on the person being asked. That person has to scan and sort:
    • all of the possible places he or she could use help.
    • what possible expertise, talents, and experience you have
    • how the two might fit together efficiently.
    • the risks, rewards, and possible outcomes of trying it out.
  5. Instead, ask “What are your goals for the next 2 quarters?” Make the conversation about them not you. Then listen actively — ask clarifying questions as you do — until you can visualize and articulate exactly where the potential client wants to go and how he or she is thinking about getting there.

    6. Keep listening and asking questions until you can say with credibility, “Here’s how I can help you get there faster, easier, and more meaningfully.” Then suggest one small bit you might do to show him or her what you mean.

Most offers — first or hundredth — don’t work because the size of the offer is too big for the amount of trust that exists.

What that first client wants is what the 100th client wants — a professional who considers it their mission to be mission critical to the client’s goals. Proving that you can listen long enough to hear exactly where the client wants to go also proves that you’ll listen when you work together on a project that the client wants to get done.

In a conversation, you demonstrate how you can work together with professional ease. Now you can offer a sample or a small first job that has a chance of success, because you’ve built trust for the offer to sit upon.

What first client stories do you know?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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How the Football Captain and the Guitarist Sold Out the Stadium!

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It Starts with Someone Who Cares about the Audience

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When I’m asked to do an off-site, I sit down the with event planner to discuss what the people attending might want or need to know. Hands down the most requested topic is how can they use social media to get people talking about the brand and their products?

It’s all about stories.
We’ve been hearing and telling stories all of our lives.
It shouldn’t be that hard.

5 Critical Steps to Spreading an Irresistible Social Media Story

If you remember back to university, you know the power of friends sharing stories. Good news, bad news, rumors and truths can fly through a school fast enough to make any news network jealous.

Here are the five critical steps to making that happen for you in the social business community.

  1. Build your network before you need it. It all starts with community. No matter how irresistible our message, we’ll have trouble sharing it without relationships. Building a network is more natural and easy, if we do before we need them to do something for us.
  2. Be known for one thing. Sure you can do many things, but many things are hard to remember. One thing stands out and is easily shareable. To go back to the college analogy, if I say he’s the captain of the football team or she’s plays lead guitar in the coolest rock band, you already know that other kids into sports they want to connect with him and other kids into rock want to connect with her.

    The same works now … If you are known for one thing, that one thing you are jumps to my mind when I meet someone who might need that one thing. If you’re a freelance blog writer, every time I meet someone with a growing blog, I’ll mention your name. If you’re one of a million writers who writes for blogs, magazines, websites, menus, and whatever. I’m less likely to remember exactly what you do and far less likely to share your name. When you’re one thing everyone knows what they can count on you to do and how you connect to their universe.

  3. Make folks feel proud, important, part of something bigger than then are alone when they do. Talking in the language of the people you want to help you. Make the message about them, not about you. The football captain who frames his message “Are you ready to rock the game tonight?” gets a better response than the one who says “Come to our game tonight. Show your spirit!”

    The savvy football captain says, “The team goes all out when you’re there! You rock the stands. We’ll rock the field!! RockTheGame!!”

    Let’s stay with the savvy football captain … he shows Booster Club how it’s in their interest to donate $500 worth of iTunes and permission for a concert by pointing out that they’re all on a quest to get folks to the big game. Then, he contacts the girl lead guitarist and persuades her band that a sell-out game would make a great after-concert venue.

  4. Make it easy, fun, and meaningful to share it. The Booster Club enlists the campus TV station to announce a contest for the entire school. Every ticket sold to the big game will be entered into a raffle for that $500 iTunes gift card to keep rocking.
  5. Reward and celebrate the people who do. When the game beats attendance records concert by the coolest rock band — after the game in the school quad to rock the school spirit!

We all value our friends’ attention.
We all value the time we spend with them.
We all value it when they engage with us and listen to what we’re saying.
It’s a natural next step to make it a value for them to invest in us too.

All we have to do to get them to share our story is to make them proud to be part of it.

How are you making your friends, colleagues, customers, and clients part of what you’re trying to do?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

How to Build the Deeply Connected Network that Is Key to Any Strategy

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The Magnetic Attraction of Values

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When we were writing the press release for the first SOBCon, I said,

Every business is relationships, and relationships are everyone’s business.

Our networks are relationships with people who help our businesses thrive.

If you look to your network, what will you find? What moves you to follow up when you collect a business card or meet a new contact? What brings you to invite a new company or a new person into that network that keeps your business alive?

It’s been said that …

If you want to know what you stand for, look at your friends.

It’s true in business as well as in our personal lives. It’s not what you say. It’s what you do that counts. We define and describe our values by the relationships we make. The values of the company we keep attract other people who keep those same values. We trust people who value what we do. We know they’ll choose as we choose and decide as we decide.

It’s an almost automatic, magnetic attraction.
The attraction occurs so naturally that we often don’t notice our common values until we grow our network without attention. Then like a bad download, we add a relationship that corrupts and we feel the loss we get an unexpected and negative response that doesn’t match our values set.

Trust relies on having our values aligned.
Trusted sources are foundational to strategy.

How to Build the Deeply Connected Network that Is Key to Any Strategy

They say …

Information is power.

The most powerful information isn’t published in Wikipedia or available to the masses via simple research. The best jobs never make it to the job boards. The best partnerships don’t get offered to everyone. Competitors don’t advertise their disadvantages or their future plans. It’s impossible to know about every startup about to launch and every web application that could expedite what you’re currently developing. Yet that scarce information is the rocket fuel that drives a brilliant strategic plan.

Strategic information like that depends on a deeply connected, values-based network of relationships. Access to prized information is what advances your position more quickly than any other resource can.

Developing a deeply connected network that brings that information to you is key to any strategic plan.

Here’s how to build a power network like that.

  1. Know your values. Identify the values that need to be present to determine a “go” or “no go” decision in your business. Those values represent your brand and the foundation of the relationships that will help your business thrive.
  2. Use those values to identify the network relationships you want to establish and cultivate. The people and businesses who share your values will be predictable and easy to trust because they will make the same decisions as you would even when the situation is not clearly black and white.
  3. Become an information magnet and filter. Develop a sense of what information is available to everyone and what is not. Put to use what informs your position. Capture and catalogue scarce information that is irrelevant to you.
  4. Pass on to others in your network information you’ve captured that will improve their position. If you share a trend building, a competitive initiative, or a new tech development about to be announced that could change their strategy, you’ll soon find they are sharing similar information with you.
  5. Treat your network as highly valued. Offer them the same regard you would offer a world leader you admire. Hold them in the highest respect. Keep their secrets. Make time for them. Value their time even more than you value your own.
  6. Show your clear appreciation. Point out their great work. Have gratitude not expectation. Realize and appreciate their achievement by filtering the connections you offer them.
  7. Choose them wisely and trust their truth. Enlist only those willing to invest to equal depth. Seek a comrades that “won’t let each other fail.” Ask them often to challenge you to see and know the truth.

A deeply connected network isn’t measured by numbers, but by commitment. Five people who hold us to a true north outweigh 500 who say we’re always right. Reach for one or two who are willing to grow your mind, your heart, your resolve, and your vision as well as your bottom line and you’ll find that many more of the same kind will find their way to you.

A deeply connected network like that is irresistible.

On what values do you deeply connect?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

3 Keys to Keeping Women Leaders in Your Company

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A Guest Post by
Jacqueline Snider

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Don’t Let the Women Leave

When women leaders leave a company, the company loses talent, mentorship, and a distinct point of view. If it’s happening regularly, you might wonder about their reasons for leaving. It’s probably not what you’re thinking.

Did they leave because of the work schedule?
No.

Did they leave because of the salary?
No.

Did they leave because of the workload?
No.

Changing those circumstances might make a happy woman leader even happier, but those aren’t the keys to keeping strong women leaders. Why did the women leaders leave?

When asked why they left, women leaders often say the company just wasn’t worth the sacrifice.

So what are the keys to keeping great women leaders?

Key #1: Acknowledge the power of ‘broad spectrum’ vision

If you only reward the leaders that focus on single tasks and perceptions, you are alienating your broad spectrum thinkers and ultimately losing a lot of your talent.

Women leaders tend to notice a variety of things all at the same time. Rather than focusing narrowly on a single perception or task, women leaders are able to simultaneously engage in a variety of thought processes. They are using ‘broad spectrum noticing,’ a way of engaging in an all-encompassing way with their coworkers.

While women are working they may be aware of their coworkers’ emotions, may be anticipating what other people need or want in a given situation and may then make subtle adjustments in their environment to avoid conflicts that could arise. Most companies don’t encourage this way of thinking and their women leaders leave once they approach senior positions.

Acknowledge their unique way of viewing their work world.

And then reward that vision.

Key#2: Acknowledge the value of daily work experiences

A lot of organizations try to motivate their employees by emphasizing the possibility of upward advancement in their companies. Women leaders, however, do not perceive their trade-offs—including stress, time and relationships—to be adequately compensated by the rewards being offered in return, such as promotions, higher salaries and higher profiles.

Women leaders don’t see their present work experience as only a stepping stone to their future. The quality of their everyday work life affects them significantly and women leaders are not satisfied with sacrificing their now simply for some goal in their future.

What do women leaders want everyday?

Women place a higher value on carrying out their daily work experiences than what the job might give them as far as future career goals and advancement. That doesn’t mean women aren’t concerned with their career advancement possibilities, but it does mean that they’re not willing to work in a suboptimal work experience to get to the next level.

When management says things like, “Everyone has to takes their bumps and knocks when they first start out. Putting up with some bad managers and difficult working conditions is all part of getting promoted,” it just doesn’t ring true.

Women leaders simply aren’t interested in slogging away at a difficult position everyday just to get somewhere higher up once they’ve paid their dues. In fact, they’ll leave that position for another and another until they find a job that pays attention to the texture of their everyday experiences while they’re at work.

This means that if you want to keep talented, driven women in your company you must encourage a daily work experience that is rewarding for your employees.

Believing your women leaders will put up with and hang in until they are eventually promoted is an old-school mentality that’s outdated.

Acknowledge their experiences.

Key #3: Acknowledge that larger vision motivates daily actions

A lot of old-style companies link performance to game metaphors. For example, If you attain this volume of sales you’ll be able to spin the ‘Leaders wheel’ and win a great prize. Women leaders find these ideas, which traditionally defined purpose, as too limiting and often pointless and childish.

Women leaders are motivated by their daily work when it is tied to a larger vision. They see their work through a social lens and are most inspired when their work performance is acknowledged as being tied to relationships—not treated like a game.

Women are concerned with their work relationships and the social fabric and climate of their everyday work experience. They feel encouraged when their work relationships are strong and dynamic, ever-growing and evolving. These building blocks of a successful team are central to women leaders’ work goals.

Games, on the other hand, encourage competition—pitting individuals against each other. After all, there can only be one winner. This type of reinforcement doesn’t foster teamwork and doesn’t recognize that other people helped get that ‘winner’ to the Leaders wheel.

Acknowledge the larger vision that drives the people of the organization.

As companies grow more web-focused and rely more on the quality of their relationships to survive and thrive, the social fabric of their everyday company experience becomes more important. If organizations want to keep their top talent, women leaders’ visions need to be acknowledged and rewarded meaningfully.

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Author’s Bio:
Jacqueline Snider writes and works at Snider Editing and Writing where she creates images for clients through words she chooses. You can find her on Twitter as @JackieSnider

Thank you, Jackie. Great thinking. 🙂

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

The Big Challenges of Working at Home

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A Guest Post by
Rachel Carlson

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BIG Challenges of Working From Home

One memory of my experience working from home sticks out to me – a video Skype meeting with one of my first clients. I rushed to put on some nice clothes, cleaned up my office a little and prepared as best I could. When the meeting finally happened, the client remarked “I expected to see a person in their pajamas in a tiny one bedroom apartment.”

And that’s a part of the “work from home problem” isn’t it? Normal business people, as they like to think of themselves, have some fairly critical prejudices against work-from-home workers. With that one remark, I realized that the client thought of people who work from home with two things in mind:

  • I was probably too lazy to put on some decent clothes for a meeting.
  • I was more than likely not making enough money to have more than a studio apartment.

This misconception is one of the biggest challenges of working from home – among many others. Once you convince your clients that you aren’t some slob, furiously clamoring for a living from the scraps of “real businesses,” you have an opportunity to overcome all the challenges and become a successful entrepreneur.

Setting Reasonable Hours

It’s true that few of us work the 9-5 grind. And why do so if you don’t have to? What is it really about that eight-hour period that makes it so “work-worthy?” I honestly admit that I hate working 9-5, and I don’t normally work in periods longer than four hours. When you work with clients, however, you have to set reasonable hours for when they can contact you. Try the following to keep those hours, without interfering with your preferred work schedule:

  • Make yourself available for calls at a normal schedule (like 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.). If you’re getting so many calls that it’s interfering with your life, you have a very good problem and might need to consider hiring some help. It should go without saying that a mobile phone is essential.
  • If you don’t want your mobile number published, simply forward your number through Phone.com with a more professional 888 number that you can give your clients. This has the added benefit of allowing you to see when it’s a work call (and avoid answering with a hearty “what’s up?”).

Competing With the “Big Box” Providers

This seems to be a bit of a misconception carried over from the brick and mortar business world. You can actually compete with larger companies quite easily. In fact, you have some decisive advantages:

  • You don’t have much overhead, meaning you can usually undercut like crazy. But don’t get carried away. Do some research to find out how much your major competitors are charging for similar services and set your prices just under theirs. If you go too cheap, clients won’t believe that you do good work.
  • You are a single person. Always highlight the fact that you are the only person a client needs to speak to – you take the order and finish it yourself. Clients usually love this. In many situations, you can even beat the turnaround times offered by large companies simply because of the lack of red tape.
  • Do research on every client and gear your pitch towards their needs. If they are a small company, they’ll love that you work alone. Larger companies might get concerned with your slower turnaround time. With these types of clients, you don’t need to stress that you work from home. You do need to stress that you have an unprecedented personal dedication to each client.
  • You can establish a deeply personal brand. If you design business cards, for example, and have received many compliments on your attention to raised print designs, leverage this with future clients. While larger companies have an army of professionals doing the same thing, nothing can beat your personal approach.

Meeting With Clients

It’s fairly rare that a client requests a face-to-face meeting. Actually, most of your clients will be very busy (or will want to seem like they are) and will convert after a single phone call or email. Some will prefer to do a video chat. If you serve some local clients, they might want to meet. But as a general rule, never invite the client to your home to do business. Instead, learn to love lunch meetings. Offering to take a client out to lunch to discuss a new contract is a great way to avoid having to reveal that you work from home, while showing a potential client that you have a professional attitude towards business.

On the other hand, I’ve secured more contracts over a beer than over lunch. If you work in a particularly casual industry like web development, SEO, or content writing, your best tool can be a clean, quiet bar. This works well for meetings after 5 p.m.

But remember that working from home is just an alternative to working in an office, not necessarily a license to show up in shorts and a t-shirt. Business people will still expect you to look professional, and you have to be very careful about casual business conversations. You still have a product to sell, and you need to project an image of professionalism at all times.

Sure there are little challenges that we face at home or in an office, but …

What do you find are the big challenges of working at home for you?

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Author’s Bio:
Rachel Carlson is a writer and student that works from home. While she spends a lot of her time writing, she also helps different companies like Clear Wireless with gaining exposure through various blogs and websites. She has recently started a new Twitter account and is finally going to give it a real shot. She can be followed at @carlson_rachel.

Thanks, Rachel. You covered this big topic in fresh way.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Are You Afraid of Getting Personal in Business?

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Guest Post
by Annabel Candy

Would you like to build stronger relationships with your potential clients and create trust faster?

Me too and I’m finally making in roads. It took me 1o years to work out how to get my clients to trust me or, more accurately, to accidentally discover how to build their trust faster, but now I’ve cracked it I’m never going back.

When I first set up my own business in 1998 I didn’t know much about the business world and I lacked confidence. I felt as if I didn’t fit in. In my mind business people were hard-nosed professionals, wearers of suits and time poor workaholics.

To make things worse it wasn’t just that I felt as if I didn’t fit in. I really didn’t. I worked from home on a small island in New Zealand and all my clients were a 30 minute ferry ride away in the city.

They had real jobs in real offices. They were real business people and I was just a pretender, a business wannabe.

To make sure my prospective clients didn’t find out that I worked from home I played safe. I invested in a great logo in a timeless design and chose safe corporate colors of blue and grey.

My branding, which carried through to my website and business cards, looked classy and professional but it didn’t have any personality. It just wasn’t me.

Being new to business I did what I had to do to start finding work. I got the yellow pages out and started cold calling.

My business is web design and web copywriting. I had an MA in Design for Interactive Media and two years experience designing, writing and setting up effective websites but getting work was still hard. Like pulling nails in fact, and during the nine years I ran that business I never once got a job unless I met a client face to face.

Even after we got our first few jobs and started getting leads through the search engines and word of mouth recommendations, I still had to meet people before they’d give me the job.

But over the past few years my business has turned around and so have my clients. All of a sudden I have clients in faraway places who’ve never met me and couldn’t even if they wanted to. Even though I live in a small Australian vacation resort town I now have clients all over the world.

So what changed?

Two years ago I started blogging. I set up a blog called Get In the Hot Spot because I wanted to learn about social media and blogging to help my web design clients.

I wrote about travel but my blog posts often strayed into personal development or just personal stories.

My blog was definitely not a marketing tool for my business but gradually people started contacting me and asking if they could work with me even though they’d never met me.

People all around the world suddenly wanted to work with me not because they knew my qualifications or work experience, but because of personal experiences I’d shared on my blog.

Looking back to when I was new to business I made a big mistake by always putting up a professional front. I hid my personality and values behind what I thought was business-like behavior.

But sharing personal stories has helped build trust and grow my business much more effectively. Whereas before I probably came across as one of those boring experts we all try to avoid, now people see me as a real person, someone they wanted to hang out with online and offline, someone flawed like them and someone they’d enjoy working with.

These days I still have my safe, grey and blue corporate website for my web design business Mucho but my fun blog Get In the Hot Spot has really taken over. To give you an idea of the difference in branding check out the logos.


Which business would you prefer to work with?

 

How to Get Personal in Business

Blogging helped me grow my business so well that I eventually set up a separate blog where I could share my business and online marketing tips. But I’m careful that, although the topic is business, the writing style is still fun and shows my personality. I often share personal stories there too if they’re relevant.

You don’t have to have a blog to share your personal side with your clients and show your personality. You can do it on your website, through Twitter or Facebook or anywhere else you connect with your clients both on and offline.

Of course there are parameters and you don’t want to over share, but these are my tips for humanizing your business by sharing personal stories:

  1. Be personal but still professional. Make sure your language and stories are family friendly.
  2. Tell stories that people can connect with and choose personal themes like childhood, family or holidays that everyone can relate to.
  3. Keep it interesting – short, sharp injections of personal stories are good. Lessons learned are always popular. Endless rambling monologues about you aren’t.
  4. Inject humor into your story. Everyone likes to laugh and a smile or chuckle will make people relate to you faster.
  5. It’s a two way street. Don’t forget to pay an interest in your client’s personal life too and ask them about their family or vacation plans. It will let them know you care about them as people, not just as potential clients, and help you find common ground.

What are your experiences? Do you share personal stories with your clients?

————————————

Annabel Candy is a copywriter, web designer and travel fiend. She wrote Successful Blogging in 12 Simple Steps to help other small business owners and writers tap into the power of blogging. Annabel shares her blogging tips at Successful Blogging and her travel stories and personal writing at Get In the Hot Spot.

Thanks, Annabel, for sharing your story!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!