Avoid the Fluff & Get Clients NOW!!

It's easy to slide down the "rabbit hole" of doing, doing, doing. . .

Doing more social posts

Doing more to our graphics (or getting new headshots)

Doing more edits on our website

There is a time and a place for those things but if you’re wondering where your next client is coming from or if you’re struggling to pay the bills then that time is not now.

In my decades working as a salesperson and sales coach, I’ve met so many smart and talented women business owners. Often, these women have beautiful branding and gorgeous websites but even so they have a hard time staying in business. I started to wonder...what were they doing wrong? As I got to know some of these women and worked with a few of them, I noticed some issues. They would talk and talk and talk about themselves but never ask specific questions. They would drone on about what they did but never establish their value. They were smart and great at their work but their businesses were failing because they were trying to live off of referrals. They believed that marketing was the answer. Spoiler alert: it's not.

When I meet a business owner who is complaining that they have no clients or customers, the mistake they often make is that they do everything out of order.

They focus on "getting headshots" and "branding their website" before having any money coming in the front door. I’ve seen the same mistake made by countless smart, highly experienced business women from various industries: lawyers who became life coaches, engineers who became authors, medical doctors who became health coaches, Harvard professors who became business coaches and ivy leaguers who became email marketers. They understood business. They were wicked smart. I kept asking myself...how were they missing this?

What I came to realize was that the online space can play on your worst fears and press on your self-doubt like no other space. This can cause many women to feel defeated before they’ve even begun. There is so much pressure to do more and be more visible that the reason you wanted to start your business in the first place can get lost. You wanted to share. You wanted to serve. You wanted to support. But you are getting exhausted just trying to keep up.

What I’m here to tell you is that there is a better way. You can avoid all of the fluff and get clients this week. I want to share with you an example of a client of mine who did just that, even in the midst of all that is going on in the world right now. So, here's a little case study for you.?

I started working with a brand new client who ran an e-commerce business. Their business was doing well but they wanted to start consulting for similar businesses. My advice to them was to focus on three things. This is the “avoid the fluff, get clients now” system. The first step is to resist the urge to build a website. Eventually a website becomes important but at the outset it's not necessary. Second, I had them focus on one platform. For this particular person, based on what they wanted to consult around, we chose LinkedIn. They already had two hundred and twenty contacts and their profile included lots of information about their e-commerce business and their background. So, we worked on their LinkedIn profile and then we just focused on reaching back out to their existing network. Third, we worked on creating one new piece of content.

Let's go into a little more detail about the steps I just described. This person had 220 existing connections on LinkedIn. So, we literally worked on their profile. We went to the people in their existing network and asked them for recommendations and endorsements while endorsing and recommending them. Then, we created one piece of strategic content that spoke to the next level of service that this person wanted to offer. It’s important to point out too that we did not reach out to all 220 connections that this person had. We reached out to 12 people that this person already had some sort of past relationship with. Without a website, just by focusing on one platform and working on existing connections, my client got one sales call and one close within 7 days.?

The reason this system works is that it prevents you from spending 10-hour days working on getting yourself out there or marketing your business. Instead, you focus on creating one piece of content and that might only take you one hour. Then you can spend another hour connecting with specific people and a third hour actually speaking to someone, closing the sale, and then a fourth hour delivering the service you just sold. Within just four hours you’ll have much more to show for your time than from the 10 hours of fiddling with your website or designing marketing materials. When it comes to how you spend your time, I recommend that you avoid the fluff and work on getting clients.

My best advice to you is: don’t worry about your website today, even if you already have one. A website won’t get you new clients this week. I'm not saying that it never will. But, if you need clients this week, spending time on your website is not going to make that happen. Instead, go out and find clients rather than waiting for them to find you. If you’re wondering where your next client is coming from, I'm here to tell you they're all around. Getting clients is about focusing on the person in front of you and not on the fluff. Our time is precious so I encourage you to focus on what’s most important.?

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