When I work with clients to grow their revenue we implement the Licence to Bill Success Blueprint (find out more in my online course, The Spotted Orange Strategy). In summary one of the first things we do is work on the following:
Marketing
Marketing is usually the way people let others know about their services (i.e Step 3. And its important to invest in marketing.
The thing is, many people invest a lot in marketing only to:
Get overwhelmed with leads they don't have enough time to connect with personally but don't know what else to do with them (noting that leads will go cold very quickly)
Not charge what they're worth which makes delivery less enjoyable and quality can suffer.
This happened to me too.
What happened
A few years ago I was invited by several large organisations to speak at their conferences in all the capital cities in Australia. After hearing me present business growth strategies I got between 5-10 business cards given to me by those in the audience wanting to have a conversation about working together further.
At that time I had just started my business and didn't have all my systems set up.
So I did my best to call everyone within a week of the conference. But I couldn't get to them all. It took me 4 weeks to call everyone and by that time the momentum had gone.
For those I did manage to call and set up a meeting with, I faced another challenge. I hadn't mapped out what I was offering and how much to charge. This meant I ended up creating custom service packages for everyone who invested to work with me.
As you can imagine this made it quite difficult to manage when it came to delivering my services. I had to continuously refer back to the engagement letter to ensure I was fulfilling but not working outside scope. And I wasn't able to leverage off any standard templates. Because every job was slightly different, nothing was "standard."
Big learning
That's when I realized that I needed to focus more on step 2 in the above process. I needed to make my life easier by standardizing what I do for most of my clients. When it came down to it, everyone wanted basically the same thing but because I hadn't invested the time getting my offer right, I ended up selling multiple different variations of the same service.
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I am a speaker, published author, sales strategist and coach to small businesses. Over the past decade, I've worked with some of the largest organisations in the world, including PricewaterhouseCoopers, Macquarie Bank and have been invited to speak at the National Audit Conference hosted by the Institute of Chartered Accountants. I'm brought in by clients increase their revenue. I run a 3 day sales and communication workshop where I teach my 12 step sales process. www.licencetobill.com.au
Jef Lippiatt, Owner at Startup Chucktown
Getting marketing right can be tricky. The goal I use is start small and iterate often.
Jenny Tse at Licence to Bill™
@Jef Lippiatt - I agree Jef. Starting small allows us to test things like our marketing strategy as well as our offerring.