How to get more clients as a consultant

I hope you enjoyed this podcast. It's a recording of a live stream that I recently undertook called "How to Get More Clients as a Consultant." 

However, don't let that title put you off: this is not just for consultants. In fact, the skills and the strategy that I cover during this episode would be appropriate for any B2B (business-to-business) client. So yeah, I hope you enjoy it, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

One quick question I'd love to ask: do you prefer the podcast in video format or in audio format? The last few I've done have been in video, but I'm just trying to get some feedback.

If you want to know more from me and you want to benefit from nearly 30 years of experience helping thousands of businesses in hundreds of industries all over the world and the time that I've spent learning from the worlds leading masters in the world of sales and marketing, the next step for you is to book a one-to-one meeting with me and you can do so by going to resultsmastery.com thanks very much for listening.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Hello, everybody, and welcome. Steve Mills here. Welcome to my live stream, the Results Mastery live stream. We're streaming live today, and it just blows my mind that we can do this. How the world has changed in the 31 years that I've been in business. But we're actually streaming live on Facebook, on YouTube, on LinkedIn, on we're using something called StreamYard. We're going out on uh iTunes, uh, Amazon Music, Spotify, and about 30 other places. It's absolutely remarkable, I think, uh, the opportunity that is right now. Anyway, uh, welcome, thank you for your time in being here. And I'm here to make sure that you get the best possible use of your time. Uh, you know, if you want to treat this as a lunch break and eat a sandwich or have a cup of tea at the same time, that's absolutely cool. Um, but I'm here to talk to you about how to get more clients as a consultant. Now, this is a little bit specialist from a point of view of I work with lots of consultants, coaches, advisors, trainers, professional service firms, and so on. Now, if that's not you, don't worry, because everything that I'm going to cover today is pretty transferable. You know, you could utilize this in most businesses, certainly in the B2B market, uh, which is business-to-business market, but also the B2C, which is business to consumer market. So it would work, generally speaking, in most of those um uh markets. So uh without further ado, let's press on with things because I know you've only got so much time. We're gonna go today for, I don't know, somewhere around about uh 20 minutes, something like that. So, you know, sit back, relax, uh draw your own conclusions. Uh, one thing I would say right at the start is uh my objective really is I suppose to try and impress you, you know, in terms of my knowledge, which I'm hoping I can do. As I mentioned, I've got actually 31 years experience. I've worked with over 10,000 businesses, which totally blows my mind, uh, and have helped them to achieve an average, an average of 45%, which is pretty high, actually, because you know, some of those businesses, not all, but some of them, have taken my advice and then done nothing with it. What a waste of time that is. And so they've got no results. So that probably makes actually if we if I you know remove those, that percentage would be even higher. Are you with me? So, anyway, let's let's crack on. So uh I want to introduce you to a system that I've developed, and I believe it's a really effective way for consultants and other businesses to market themselves. I believe one of the biggest mistakes that people make, apart from not doing any marketing or not doing enough marketing, is that they go straight for the straight, straight in for the kill, you know, straight for the sale. I get people all the time say, uh, would you connect to me on LinkedIn? I look at their profile, make up a business decision. I go, yes. What happens then? 30 seconds later, they've sent me a 500-word uh message within LinkedIn trying to sell me something, even though they don't know who I am, what I do, whether I need them, uh, or anything. They're just it's like going up to somebody in the street going, hi, my name's Steve. Would you marry me? No, oh all right, then I'll go and ask somebody else. Eventually I might find somebody crazy enough to do it, but it's probably not the best way of trying to, you know, get a marriage. And we want a marriage of businesses, don't we? We want a marriage between my business and your business. And that's what I'm about today. I'm not trying to sell you anything, but what I am doing is offering you a free one-to-one meeting afterwards if you would like one. But listen to me, uh, listen to what I've got to say, and then make your own mind up. If you do want that meeting, go to resultstery.com, click on one of the goal buttons and get yourself booked in to a uh a free one-to-one meeting. Okay, so you probably see from the wall behind me that the results mastery system is based on six different levels, uh, a bit a little bit like a pyramid, you know. If you actually took that pyramid as like an upside down one and you had obscurity, overcoming obscurity is the first level. Uh, this is such a big area, this obscurity thing. In fact, I'm gonna go so far as to say obscurity is the biggest problem that small businesses face. Nobody knows about us. I've been doing this for 30 odd years. I've got probably in my social media and my email marketing, best part of about 100,000 different businesses, which is a lot more than most people have got. And yet there are three million businesses in the UK alone. And I've worked in Singapore and um uh where else have I worked? Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, uh, Switzerland, uh, Poland, uh, Spain, you name it, you know, and uh, you know, my database is is minuscule compared with what it could be. But if you're like 99% of uh the businesses that I speak to, it's a lot bigger than yours. Uh I hear people all the time saying, uh, you know, how many people have I have you got on LinkedIn? They say, well, about I don't know, about about a thousand. That's a thousand out of 30 million people in the UK, and they've got a thousand of them. Now, maybe they're very local business, and I get that. If they've got if they provide uh a service to hotel owners on the Isle of Wight, where I live, and they know that there's uh 10,000 hotels here and they've got 10,000 contacts, in other words, they've got all the contacts, then great, you've done a great job. But if you're like most people, then the answer is you haven't. So you've got to stop and grow this database. If I asked you about your email database, how big is that? Again, most people, yeah. I spoke to somebody the other day and they said, Well, uh, we've well, we haven't got an email database, but we've got a spreadsheet, and uh, there's probably about, I don't know, 250 in it. I said, Well, how long you've been in business? They said, 10 years. 10 years, and you've only got 250 contacts that you can put out a marketing message to. What have you been doing? You know, really. You know, I don't wish to be harsh or hard or superior in any way. I'm not, I'm just a normal guy, you know, and uh, but you know, if I'd only got 250 people in my database, um, I wouldn't be doing too well financially. So I need we need to get more people. That's step one. We've then got to step two, consistently communicate with them. We've got to keep in touch with people, and again, I hear people say say things like, Oh, I don't want to bombard people, I don't want to, you know, uh push too much. Why not? You know, if people aren't interested, they'll unsubscribe. You know, if you're on my list right now and you're not interested in what I do, just unsubscribe. I hope you do. I really do. I don't want to be emailing and social media in and sending out messages to people who are interested. Why would I do that, guys? Come on. So we've got to be consistent. Now, consistent does vary from one industry to the other. You know, if you're a funeral director, you don't want to be messaging every couple of weeks saying anybody died yet that I can help. You know, clearly that that's not the case. I say that very tongue-in-cheek, by the way. Uh, but the truth of the matter is, in most industries, we're doing far less than we should be doing. We should be keeping in touch with people. How? Well, you know how. You're gonna keep in touch with them through email, through social media, through posting, through uh picking up the phone and calling people, through WhatsApp, through SMS, through meeting them, uh, maybe running events, maybe doing a live stream like I am today. That's how we're gonna keep in touch with them. We're gonna maybe uh do a video and send them a link to the video. These are all different ways that you can keep in touch with people really, really easy. Now, did you know, for example, you can advertise to people you're already connected to on LinkedIn? On LinkedIn. That's like advertising to people who are interested. On Google, you can put an advert on Google that is shown to people who go to your website. It's called remarketing, and that's the same, by the way, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, and most other social media and uh SEO websites. So, you know, there's lots and lots of opportunities. It's just, you know, do you want to take them? Do you need to take them? Because we've got to get people to that stage three. We've just connected to somebody on LinkedIn, we've started communicating with them, and at some point, hopefully, they're gonna we're gonna either push them away, which is good, we've got rid of people that we don't want that aren't interested, or more likely and and hopefully, um, people are gonna get to know, like, and trust you. They're gonna see that Steve Mills has got a seminar going. So they're gonna turn up, even if they don't know quite what it's about. They know it's gonna be good because they've listened to videos, they've seen emails, they've had communication, they've watched me on video a few times, and now they think they want to attend a live event, and now they think they want to book a meeting with me so they can have a conversation. That's the level three where they know, like, and trust me. Okay, I can't stress the importance of getting people to do that. We then need to get them to level four. This is where they communicate back to us. So it's no longer me pushing out marketing messages to people, it's about them coming back to me and talking to me, be it through email, SMS, phoning me up, and so on and so forth. So we've got to get them to that level. And and and again, that really, I suppose doing that comes down to the three levels before that. But it's almost a progression um through this idea of connecting to people, consistently communicating, getting people to know like and trust you, and then they turn into cute two-way communication. Once they've got there, we've got to take that big step, not until then, but we want to turn those contacts into meetings. This is really crucial, isn't it? You know, all that work that we've done before is of no value whatsoever until and unless, as a consultant, we get to meet them. So we got to do that. We've got to think about how we're gonna do that as well. Are we gonna charge for that initial meeting? Maybe people would take it more seriously if if we charge. You know, ever had anybody not turn up? Ever had anybody not turn up if you've charged them £250 to be there? No, I suspect not. So, you know, not saying you have to do that, I'm saying you could do that. It's one way of looking at it. But whatever way you want to do this, what you want to do is to turn those contacts into meetings. A couple of things I think are really important at this point, and one is to make sure that you're meeting the right people. You know, we don't want to meet lucky los and tire kickers and people who are uh basically trying to grab a freebie. You know, we want to meet people who are serious about growing their business. And one of the ways that I found uh that works really well in terms of doing that is to produce a pre-meeting questionnaire and that make it not not it's not gonna take them hours to fill in, but it's not gonna be three questions either. It's gonna be a a reasonable amount of questions so that they have to take, I don't know, maybe 15-20 minutes, maybe up to 30 minutes to fill it in before they meet you. Why is that important? It's because only the people who are serious are going to do it. The rest of them aren't. The rest of them are gonna go, oh well, I can't be bothered, this is not worth it. And you want to by this time, you want to be meeting people who know like and trust you, they've read your stuff, they've filled in the questionnaire, and they're committed to being there at that meeting. Now, obviously, with the technology we've got right now, the best way is still the old-fashioned way of meeting in person, you know, pressing some skin, meeting people. However, sometimes that's not possible. You know, I've got loads of clients that I've never met and never will meet. Um, I've got clients over in uh Spain, I've got clients in Portugal, I've got clients in uh Poland. You know, I've never met them, and I probably never will. If I do, great, and if I don't, that's fine. Um, the second best is doing what we're doing now, which is an online meeting. Uh, I think that's better than the phone, better than a phone meeting personally, and certainly for me it tends to convert better. So maybe that's because I enjoy it more. I I don't really know. But anyway, we've got to get them into meetings. Once we're in that meeting, we've got to turn those meetings into sales. You know, what is your conversion rate? What is your conversion rate of meeting to sale? Because if it's only 20%, right, you get 10 meetings and that equals two sales, and that's a really important number, by the way. If you don't know that number, uh have a look back over the last six months and see what your conversion rate is. And if you could improve that by 20%, so instead of getting 20%, you got 40%, which is a 20% increase. What would that do? Well, that would double your business, double your business, guys, just by improving that one little thing, yeah. All right, not overnight, but over time, because you know, next month, instead of getting six sales, you get 12 sales. You with me? And and if you manage to get it up from 40 to 60, you grow your business by 200%. And you're still only converting six out of 10 instead of two out of 10, you know, you go from 100 grand to 300 grand just by improving your meeting conversion rate. Let alone about all this other stuff there. So this is really, really valuable. This is going to make a massive difference to your business. Uh, however, I've got a question for you. Out of all the six steps there, which is your biggest weakness? Because you might want to start working on that, might you? Is it overcoming obscurity? Is it communicating with people? And by the way, when I say people, I'm not just talking about new people. One of the biggest mistakes that I see, uh, and I'm gonna say that I've never, never, ever, ever in 31 years, 10,000 businesses met a company that are fully harvesting and marketing effectively to their current and past customers. We all spend all our time and effort trying to win new customers, which is the most expensive, time consuming, difficult thing to do. There's a pot of gold, I'm telling you now, there's a pot of gold sitting in your business waiting for you to ask for it, and that is your current and your past customers. So ask. Okay, so that's a really big one. Now you may see underneath those six, I've wrote three words better, more new. What does that mean? Well, basically it means this the way you market yourself right now, you're getting a result. Whatever that result is, you might send out, you know, uh, I don't know, a weekly email. Let's look at email as an example. You send out four emails per month, and that gets you ten clients. Now, the truth of the matter is that could get you 10 clients, or it could get you a hundred clients, or it could get you no clients, dependent on what? Dependent on how effective your marketing is. I've known many many occasions where I've helped people not only with email, it could be with anything within their market. I'll give you a perfect example. A client of mine who was an accountant over in Ireland was spending about a thousand uh euros per month on Facebook advertising. I came along, uh, told them what I thought to their campaign, and uh we increased the number of inquiries from somewhere between 25 and 30 per month to over 75 per month without spending a penny more on Facebook advertising, and that's what better means. You need to do it better. Now, you you may think, well, how do I do that? Well, sign me on, get me working with you, I'll help you to do that. Or, and this is a really important one become a better business owner, learn more about marketing. Again, I can help you with this. I run training courses in various things. So, you know, if you want to work with me, uh, you know, please uh let me know. Uh the next one then is more because once you've got it better, why not spend more, you know, uh, or take you know, do more of it, whether it's picking up the phone, whether it's email marketing, you know, if you're doing email marketing once a week and it's creating 10 new clients, even if you don't do more do better, sorry, and keep it the same, why don't you do it try test the use of two emails? Would two emails per week produce 20 new clients? You with me? Because you're doing twice as much emailing, so you could, and I use the word could get twice as many inquiries. Um, and the same applies across the board, you know. Uh with with my accountant client in Ireland, you know, spending a thousand pounds. If you spend two pounds, could that get him to 150? Maybe not, it might only get him to 120, but you know, that's still highly profitable marketing. And then the last one there, uh the last one I've got for you today, is new. So if you're limiting yourself by going, well, we don't really do much marketing, Steve. We've got a website and uh uh we do we post once a week on on LinkedIn, but we don't really like social media. And uh yeah, we've got an email database, but we've only got a few hundred people in it, and uh you know we don't want to bombard people, so we send them a quarterly newsletter. Uh, but we win most of our business from word of mouth, and uh we do a little bit of networking. Now, if you're anywhere near that scenario, all I can tell you firstly, there's a massive pot of gold sitting in your business. I'll give you one example. If you've not got a referral marketing system, a plan, a process of winning business from referral, then there's a huge opportunity just there alone. So, you know, that's about all I'm gonna say. Uh, I really do believe that 99.99999% of businesses are massively, and I mean massively, massively even, uh underselling, under utilizing, under uh achieving from their sales and marketing uh results. So if you want to end that for you, get yourself booked into a meeting with me, results high for mastery.com. I look forward to speaking to you. If you've got any questions, uh please add them to the chat. I'm just gonna open the chat up. I'll leave it for a couple of minutes just while I'm finishing off. And if you have got any questions, then feel free to ask. If not, uh, as I say, get yourself booked in, it'll be the best decision you ever make. I will not uh give you a hard sell at all. I'm gonna help you during the meeting, I'm gonna talk to you about you and your business and your marketing, and at the end of it, if you decide that do you know what this Steve guy can make a big difference, then uh get in touch. And by the way, I normally, normally I would get at least a 10x return on investment. So if you pay me one pound, I would expect to get 10 back for you. Uh that's at least. So it's a no-brainer, isn't it? Really? Uh, I've not got any questions being asked, so I'm gonna go. I hope that uh was of value to you. Thanks very much for listening. If you're watching it on the recording, I'd love it if you'd share it with other people. Subscribe to me on YouTube, uh, connect to me on LinkedIn, and um you know, go to my website. We've got some great free stuff on there. Read the section about frameworks, um, yeah, that would uh provide you with great value. And I look forward to welcoming you as a client in the near future. Thank you very much for listening.