I recently became a Get Clients Now! facilitator and look forward to having you join me in upcoming webinars and public programs! Looking to jumpstart sales? Consider our August 17th webinar. REGISTER HERE  OK, that’s our brief self promotion. Now, let’s hear from C.J. Hayden, the author of the Get Clients Now! methodology.

From guest contributor, C.J. Hayden, MCC…

What’s stopping you from getting all the clients you want? Do you know? The answer to this one question may be the key to making your marketing more successful.

It would seem from the questions people ask me about marketing that everyone is trying to fix just one type of problem — how to fill their marketing pipeline with more new prospects. 

“What else should I be doing to attract potential clients?” they ask. “Where else can I go to find people who might hire me?” or “How can I be more visible online so people will contact me?” or “Should I be finding prospects by cold calling, using Twitter, running ads, giving talks, writing articles…?” 

All their questions — and it seems all their efforts — are aimed at finding ways to make contact with new people who might become clients. And every time they identify another activity that might help their pipeline get fuller, they want to add it to their ever-growing to-do list. 

But is this really what’s stopping them from getting more clients?

Is this what’s stopping you? If you are already marketing yourself in four or five different ways, will increasing that to seven or eight different ways produce better results? Or alternatively, if you drop everything you’re doing now, and start using four or five brand new marketing approaches, will that do the trick?

In my experience, it probably won’t. Continuing to try new and different approaches to fill your marketing pipeline will more often result in overwhelm, wasted effort, and failure than it will in new clients.

Instead of trying to fix your marketing by just seeking out more ways to meet people or collect names, email addresses and phone numbers, stop for a moment. What is the problem you’re trying to solve? In other words, what’s really getting in the way of your marketing success? 

Listed below are the five most common marketing problems, and questions to ask yourself to see which ones might be yours. They’re presented in order of priority — problem #1 needs to be fixed before tackling problem #2, and so on. Consider whether making changes in one of these areas might be exactly the fix your marketing needs.

1. HANDS-ON TIME: Are you spending enough time proactively marketing? Not just getting ready to market, or thinking about how to market, or feeling resistant to marketing, but actually taking steps that will lead directly to landing clients? 

If you’re not spending enough time marketing your business, fixing other problem areas won’t help much. Start keeping track of how much time you spend actively marketing each week. Most independent professionals find they need to spend from 4-16 hours weekly — less when you’re busy with paying work; more when you’re not.

2. TARGET MARKET: Do you have a clearly defined target market which you can describe in five words or less? Does this market already know they need your services? And are you spending most of your time marketing to exactly that group?

Once you feel confident you are dedicating enough time to marketing, the next hurdle is making sure you’re marketing to the right people.

Focusing your efforts on a specific target group with a defined need for your services will make everything you do more effective. 

3. MARKETING MESSAGE: Do your descriptions of your services name the benefits you offer and results you produce for your target market?

And are these benefits and results that this market is looking for?

Do you deliver your message every time you make contact?

Letting prospective clients know exactly how you can help them will make the most of the time you spend marketing to a defined audience.

Your message needs to be clear, focused on the client’s needs, and typically delivered multiple times to the same prospects.

 4. FOLLOW-THROUGH: Do you have a system for following up with every prospect until they say either yes or no? Are you able to complete all the steps for each marketing approach you are using to make it pay off?

 Without follow-through, much of your marketing effort is wasted. The typical prospect will need to hear from you (or about you) 5-7 times before deciding to work with you. And most marketing approaches need a follow-through element to succeed. For example, attending networking events requires post-event follow-up with the people you meet. Online networking requires regular participation, not just posting when you have something to promote.

 5. MARKETING APPROACH: Are the strategies and tactics you are using to reach your market the most effective approaches available to you?

Are they appropriate for your target market, and a good match for your skills and personality? 

Only after addressing the first four problem areas above should you think about changing HOW you market. Because in truth, your tactics may not need to change. Whether you’ve been marketing yourself with cold calling, public speaking, or social networking, once you are spending enough time, marketing to the right people, delivering a targeted message, and following through on all your efforts, your results will improve dramatically.

So finding new or different marketing approaches — the place where most people START to fix their marketing — is actually the last area to consider. The most effective approaches are those that include personal contact with your prospects, increase your credibility, and lend themselves to building relationships over time. And, approaches that match your skills and personality are more likely to succeed because you will actually use them instead of resisting them.

Once you know what might be stopping your marketing from being successful, make a commitment to fix what’s really wrong. Resist the temptation (and hype) to keep trying new “silver bullet” marketing tactics or overloading yourself with endless possibilities. Finding the best marketing solutions will be much easier when you’re trying to solve the right problem.

C.J. Hayden is the author of Get Clients Now!™ Thousands of business owners and independent professionals have used her simple sales and marketing system to double or triple their income. Get a free copy of “Five Secrets to Finding All the Clients You’ll Ever Need” at www.getclientsnow.com. Copyright (c) 2009, C. J. Hayden

Of all the books that I’ve read through the years, none has had more of an impact on me than Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I have never forgotten the importance of remembering people’s names. Today’s post comes from colleague and guest blogger, Renee Walkup who shares some great tips for capitalizing on the power of a name.

As salespeople, it’s critical that we constantly are on top of our game–whether we are networking, prospecting over the phone, booking appointments or presenting to a group. The bottom line is that at least 60% of our customer engagement involves building relationships and at least 80% involves trust.

One surefire way to put a roadblock up in a relationship is to either:

1. Forget someone ‘s name, or

2. Mispronounce the customer’s name

Since we don’t all have John and Jane Smith’s to deal with (remember the movie, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”? And look what happened to Brad and Angelina), the reality is, we need to be better prepared for the unexpected names and use a few tricks that can get us through possible embarrassment.

Since salespeople often ask me about this, and since I recently have had a variety of first-hand experience with my name, I thought I’d share a few tips for you on how to remember names and what to do if you are unsure as to the pronunciation of your customer’s name. Here you go…

1. Seems simple enough, but look at all the letters in the person’s name. This will give you a clue if there’s an extra vowel of syllable that would be different from what you are accustomed to seeing regularly. An example is my name. “Walker” is very recognizable “WalkUP” is less familiar.

2. Listen to the prospect’s voice mail before leaving a message. When you truly listen to the name, especially if there is an accent in the prospect’s voice, immediately write it down phonetically to YOUR eyes. That’s what I do, which helps tremendously (I just make sure my English Professor husband doesn’t see my notes since my particular form of phonetics is vastly different from the academically acceptable).

3. Call someone at the company (not the prospect) and AFTER identifying yourself, ask for his/her help in pronouncing the prospect’s name. THEN write in down using my advice in #2.

4. If you are prospecting and are unclear as to how to pronounce either the first name or the last name, pick one. It’s better to know that you are calling “Ms. Williams” than try and mispronounce her first name as “Quintel” when it’s not that. Make it easy on yourself.

5. When you return a call or are going to meet the customer in person, have your phonetic pronunciation written down in front of you. The more you say the name the more skilled you will be at using it correctly (and customers like that).

6. If attending a trade show, make sure you look at the prospect’s name tag or business card for a visual reminder of the person’s name. This will help you retain the information, especially if you use the prospect’s name 3 times over the period of your conversation.

7. Lastly, use visual cues and memory links to remind you of the person’s name. For example, if the dark-headed guy looks a bit like Michael Scott from “The Office”, and his name is “Scott”, that should be a mental reminder for you.

Internationally recognized professional speaker, author, and phone sales expert, Renee Walkup has influenced thousands of professionals at companies including: CNN, The Coca-Cola Company, Panasonic, ING Financial, Charles Schwab & Co., AT&T, Pearson Education, Genzyme,  LaFarge, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, and Nestle USA. A guest on numerous radio and TV programs, Renee is often quoted in national publications.  She is the co-author of six books, and her latest book, “Selling to Anyone Over the Phone” is a business best seller with over 30,000 copies sold.

(C)Renee Walkup, All Rights Reserved, http://www.salespeak.com

In the rush, rush, rush that defines most businesses today, we are trained to cram every possible activity we can onto our calendars. The fine art of saying “no” is a masterful technique in and of itself, IF, you can pull it off that is. Often, we are at the mercy of others who have requests that demand our time, which we cannot ignore. Still, with all of this so-called multi-tasking going on, I wonder, are we really any more effective?

For years, we have been seduced into thinking that multi-tasking is a good thing. Sales people are given atta-boys for their ability to juggle multiple priorities at once. Sales managers praise their people for being able to take customer calls, do email and text all while taking a potty break. Nothing is more disconcerting than listening to someone take a business call from the bathroom stall next to you by the way. The reinforcement of this multi-tasking mania has now led to people texting and answering email on their iPhones and Blackberry’s while driving! Absolute madness.

Quite an industry has sprung up around this notion of “managing time”. The myth is that multi-tasking isn’t managing time, it is only wasting it. An August 2009 research report from Stanford University shows that so-called high achieving multi-taskers are only frying their brain. Guru’s far more experienced than me will tell you that time management has always been a myth. All of us have the same 24 hours in the day. The #1 key to social selling success comes from a single minded focus on the “right” priorities. Your objective is to focus on the one thing – the big rock – that you complete before moving on to the next. This is especially important as you integrate social media into your sales process. The idea is to save time not waste it!

As I talk to groups about social media and how to integrate it into their sales/networking approach, I always ask, “What are your top two or three concerns about using social media?” Predictably, someone always says, “I don’t have the time.” That attitude springs from the belief that you are “adding on” to what you already do now. In reality, you need to let something else go. Everyone has time wasters disguised as results driven activities hidden somewhere on their calendar. Many are hidden in plain sight.

Try this exercise. Write down how many face-to-face networking events you attended in the past month. Even if it’s 1 per week, you probably spent at least 3 hours when you include drive time plus the event time itself. That’s 12 hours – more than a full business day each month. Now consider your hourly billable rate and ask yourself if you secured enough clients from those activities to make it worth it. The answer – based on experience and the answers I receive from every group that I poll – will likely be a resounding no! Not even close. That’s why the effective use of social networking tools like LinkedIn is such a beautiful thing. Done right, you spend “less time” actually getting better results.

How we view time is in direct proportion to our attitude about time. Your peers, your competitors and your friends don’t have any more hours in the day than you do. It is all about how you use them. If you ever want to invest in finding out how you prioritize, I encourage you to check out our Time Mastery assessment. For as little as $31 and the investment of a 10-15 minutes, you will discover just how well you work with your daily 24 hour allotment.

Time management is a myth. How you choose to spend your time moment to moment is what counts!

Twitter as a twool (as cool tech dude, Guy Kawasaki called it) has so much potential. So much more than the average – I’m just getting started with social media types or social media naysayers – realize. More than just a never ending stream of “hey, I’m headed to Starbucks for my daily dose of caffeine” type messages, Twitter gives its community of users the ability to network, share information, recommend others and search out content that is relevant to them.

I had the opportunity to demonstrate Twitter’s power in an “off the cuff” sort of way during a business meeting yesterday…at Brio in Buckhead. Yes, I know it’s crazy, but I do eat lunch. So we were talking about Twitter and I simply asked…what executive level are you trying to reach in corporations to talk with about your services? Sales VP was the answer. Without any real thought or tweaking, I whipped open Twitteriffic on my iPhone and simply typed Sales VP Atlanta. And wouldn’t you know that a major corporation in Atlanta had just placed a hiring notice for that exact position within their company. You’re saying to yourself, Barb is that really so interesting? You bet. It just so happened that this particular company is EXACTLY who my lunch guest had been trying to penetrate to not only discuss services, but because she works for a major placement firm, she knew that several of her clients fit the bill for the position. She was stunned! It didn’t occur to her to use Twitter as an alternative mechanism to traditional job boards.

The story I just shared is why I love Twitter. It is more than dribble about where people are eating breakfast. There is power and potential beyond what many people realize.

Now for the story of why I don’t like Twitter! Or maybe I should say that it is the users without a clue who leave a bad taste in my mouth.

I wasn’t with Twitter from the beginning, but I’m told by those in the know that it used to be totally about building relationships. There was a genuineness about wanting to get to know the people who wanted to follow you.

By the time I came on the scene, there was definitely a divide between the camp of people (like me) who think you use the tool to build visibility, credibility and relationships without spamming the network and those people who think there is nothing wrong with spitting out one tweet after another that is merely a sleazy sales pitch.

And now we have the abusive use of the direct message feature aka DM. It is used to SPAM people who have decided to follow what you have to say. It works like this…I decide to follow Johnny, because he seems sort of cool and his tweets are interesting. Minutes after I click the “follow” button, I receive in my Twitter inbox a direct message that is “automated” and says something like…”hey, thanks for the follow…check out or buy or sign up for my whatever…” It is all about what they have to sell without any thought as to whether I’m their buyer or not. Slinging hash on the wall basically.

Look at the picture I’ve included with my post…these are some of the messages sitting in my inbox right now. First it is…”now follow me on Facebook”. Then it’s “cool affiliate program”. Next comes “wanna make some moola?” And my personal favorite, “I just added you to my Mafia family, you should join.” Sure, I’ll get right on that.

Do you really think any of these people care about getting to know Barb? No way. I cannot stand this practice so much that the 35 people who’ve done it to me recently are now being booted from my network.

Sales people (and anyone who sells a product or service) take note. This is NOT what buyers want. In fact, they are tired of being inundated with this sort of garbage. It is what gives social media sites like Twitter a bad name. Some of us truly do want to create value and develop relationships that ultimately lead to sales. In my opinion, these DM tactics are used by people either ignorant about the impression they are creating about themselves, or they are so desperate to make a sale that they don’t care.

I’m curious, what do you think?