A summary of things you should know about Never Chase Clients Again according to Michael Moshiri: Introduction In this episode Michael Moshiri reveals all the insights on his book, NeverRead More
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]]>In this episode Michael Moshiri reveals all the insights on his book, Never Chase Clients Again, where he shares the fastest, easiest, and most effective system for getting qualified consulting clients.
In his book Moshiri provides his personal step-by-step principles for getting new clients along with the most effective lead generation tactics of the world’s largest and most successful consulting firms. The goal of the book is to help you attract highly qualified leads with little effort, teach you the business development strategies that are ineffective, and how to build effective relationships with your clients.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are in the business of consulting, have a small, limited budget and need help laying the foundation for an effective marketing plan that will bring quality leads.
This book takes a unique approach that requires not social media campaigns, not content marketing and it has no online lead generation or practices in it. At the same time it’s presenting a reliable, predictable, and repeatable system for finding, reaching, and connecting with consulting clients in any industry. I wrote the book to share a system that I’ve developed for finding highly qualified clients by leveraging that fact and not simply trying to circumvent it with the hottest methods that are out there. I bring in that tried and true system to offer people an alternative to the hottest method of the day.
This book has three parts and the way to approach it is to look at it in parts. Part one of the book provides a foundational knowledge that anyone who is in consulting needs to ensure their success in implementing the system. Part two provides them with a five step system for finding, reaching, and connecting with those highly qualified clients. And lastly, part three builds on part one and two to help you become more effective and efficient in implementing this system, strategies, and principles. Read the first part of the book, skim through part two, and then review part three so that you know the key areas that you need to be focusing on.
It would have to be walking away with the knowledge that business is not geometry. The shortest path to highly qualified clients isn’t a direct route. The shortest path to ideal clients is through someone else who knows them better than you do.
This book is packed with a lot of powerful information and I am going to highlight some of that information so that you can decide whether this is a book that you should read or not.
The chapters in Part One will help you to learn five reasons why many consultants fail in their efforts to find, reach, and win highly qualified clients. Then I go into the three core qualifications that any consultant has to demonstrate in order for their prospects and clients to really trust them and want to do business with them. The three core qualifications that are highlighted in that chapter are character, commitment, and competence.
The chapters in Part Two outline the system. The very core step, the one you have to start with first, is establishing your criteria and the main objective in this step is to develop a clear definition of who you consider to be your highly qualified perspective clients.
And in Part three you get to apply at of what you’ve learned and become better at it.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:37
“Consulting has always been and will always remain a business that is built on personal relationships.” – Michael Moshiri
For the past 23 years I have spent my days working in the industry of consulting and I’ve worked with big firms such as Deloitte, EY, and PwC. I have built and raised from nothing, a national consulting practice and also worked with some midsize firms.
I have spent the majority of my career in the world of consulting and one of the things that is the most critical function for any consulting is finding highly qualified clients. In the time that I have spent in the world of consulting I recognize that there are two types of people. The first type people are the types that jump on lead generation strategies that are the most popular or the hottest at the moment. And then there are those who use tried and true methods that help them find highly qualified clients.
Click by Rom Brafman and Ori Brafman
Buy Never Chase Clients Again by Michael Moshiri on Amazon today
Visit NeverChaseClientsAgain.com to learn more about the book
Visit MichaelMoshiri.com to learn more about Michael and his services
Follow Michael Moshiri on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Moving Targets by Gabriel Aluisy
The Seven Levels of Communication by Michael Maher
Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Simple Ways Entrepreneurs Can Attract Customers
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Selfish Scared and Stupid according to Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory: Introduction In this episode Kieran Flanagan and Don Gregory take aRead More
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]]>In this episode Kieran Flanagan and Don Gregory take a deep dive into their book, Selfish Scared and Stupid, where they demystify the behaviors behind the failure and success of business ideas.
In their book, Flanagan and Gregory will help you design your business effectively with strategies to understand why the public fails to engage with your brand and why your product is falling short. The goal of the book is to teach you product survival tactics, how to offer customer strategic reward programs, how to turn fear into action, and how to make products hard to resist.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are struggling to get their product or service engaged with the public and need a proven system to increase their customer reach and sales.
We have been told that it was funny which our intent wasn’t to be necessarily funny but human beings are funny by nature. It’s real and it’s not speaking to ideas but instead its dealing with what is true and real for human beings.
This book is a fairly easy read and written in the order that you would approach an engagement program. It probably works best read in order but I have had people say to me that they dip in and out as well.
We need to design for success rather than just hoping for the best and relying on short term strategies. It’s also about swimming with the current of human nature because if we don’t we get exhausted, we go nowhere and we often give up.
We start the book off explaining why we really need to be thinking selfish, scared and stupid. We make the distinction between acting selfish, scared and stupid which is human beings default position. It is why we survived, thrived and evolved as a species and ended up in this dominant position on the planet and it’s just that they don’t sounds like particularly good things. We tend to deny those things in our decision making but our primitive brains still drive a lot of our decision making. The survival thinking drives the fundamental thinking beneath our decision making.
From there we move on to how to do it. We section the book into think selfish, think scared, think stupid and dive into each of those points. Thinking selfish is fundamentally about coming from a place of what’s in it for them, and we need to move from what’s in it for me to what’s in it for them. So often in business we see that people are so caught up in what’s in it me. This section is about how to understand the extraordinary power of flipping your mindset to how you can filter the world constantly into what’s in it for someone else. And by doing that you can engage your staff with not only your goals but there’s as well.
In think scared the reality is that fear drives us a lot of the time. We look at how to flip that fear that has a stay in inaction to how to create a fear of not taking action. It’s about minimizing the fear of action and maximizing the fear of in action. So what we look to do is how to make change seem less fearful and part of the way we do it is by linking it to the known. Thinking scared isn’t about making people afraid, it’s about understanding how fear drives us and making sure that fear is on the appropriate side of the ledger in terms of stimulating action.
Then we look at thinking stupid and for a lot of people this is the most challenging one. Again it’s not about being stupid, it’s about thinking stupid and what that means is looking for the most easy way to achieve an outcome. It’s about making sure that our tasks are really easy and how to reduce resistance to those tasks. We spend a lot of time on why failure happens and how to make failure difficult. Instead of relying on these ideas, relying on short term strategies, the fundamental idea of the book is how we design for success.
“We are all selfish, scared and stupid.” – Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory
“Make failure difficult.” – Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory
We have a long history in advertising and spent a long part of our lives getting a better understanding of what drives human behavior. Most of our careers have been in entrepreneurial startups and our interests are in what drives human behavior. We have a business called The Impossible Institute which is a research, innovation, and think tank where we look at the gap in what people say they do and what they actually do. In that gap we find interesting stuff about how to motivate, how to get results, and how to help entrepreneurs.
We saw so much inspiration around what was driving human behavior and so much of it was based on ideas. What we wanted to do was step back and take a look at what was really driving human beings and generating results.
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Buy Selfish Scared and Stupid by Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory on Amazon today
Visit TheImpossibleInstitute.com to learn more about the book
Follow Kieran Flanagan on Twitter and Facebook
Follow Dan Gregory on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez | Traction: A Startup Guide To Getting Customers by Justin Mares | Hooked: How To Build Habit Forming Products by Nir Eyal
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Simple Ways Entrepreneurs Can Attract Customers | 5 Reasons Why Your Marketing Sucks
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>5 Simple Ways Entrepreneurs Can Attract Customers To Their Business You have a great product or service and yet you seem unable to attract customers to your business and makeRead More
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]]>5 Simple Ways Entrepreneurs Can Attract Customers To Their Business
You have a great product or service and yet you seem unable to attract customers to your business and make a sale. Almost every new entrepreneur faces this challenge after they start off a small business.
And the root cause of this problem is often your inability to reach out to your customers.
The lack of advertising and marketing your product or service may be drawing you back from your customers. But for a small business, with limited funds, it is often difficult to allot a substantial amount for advertising and marketing.
In such a circumstance, what do you do? Simple; you just focus on the ways to do it right. Let’s take a look at some simple ways entrepreneurs can attract customers to their business:
Tip 1: Rely on word-of-mouth. This tried-and-tested option never fails! If you can build an army of satisfied customers, it will work much better than a couple of billboards or television ads. They are the best tools of advertisement you may find.
To turn a customers into satisfied customers, you have to work on the three premises:
• Offer a great product/service – the basic necessity for a successful business
• Ensure great customer service – remember, always serve with a smile
• Offer a reward for referral – the bigger the incentive, the better your opportunity
And soon you will have a good number of spokespersons at no added cost!
Tip 2: Involve and engage. When a prospect walks in, make sure you turn them into a customer. How do you do it? Interest them with an offer, give them a free sample, request them to enter a contest, and use any other means you can think of.
People love free stuff. They also love offers and discounts. And when they get something at no cost or maybe low cost, and are happy with it, they are sure to come back and pay for it. And they are sure to talk about your business to their contacts.
Tip 3: Build a website. If you aren’t online yet, you need to be – NOW! A website isn’t a luxury anymore; it’s a necessity. If you aren’t online, you are missing out attracting the prospective customers who stick to their PCs, laptops, smartphones, tablets, et al.
You don’t really need to invest thousands of dollars to ensure a web presence. Just make sure someone who knows how to do it right does it. Otherwise, you will be stuck with a site that doesn’t work for your business.
Tip 4: Connect on social media. When Mandie Miller started off her business Got What It Cakes, she built a website. But the business only picked up once her sister put up a Facebook page for it.
Lesson learned: While a website is essential for your business, no business can ignore the reach of social media these days. Create a page on Facebook, get an account on Twitter, or add images on Pinterest and Instagram – do whatever it takes to enhance your reach.
Tip 5: Get involved. While you will always have competitors, and you will always have to keep a lookout for them, you also need to focus on collaboration. Make a list of complementary businesses and promote each other to your respective clientele.
Also, don’t forget about the community; after all, you are a part of it. Give back. Charitable or environment-friendly work never goes unnoticed. And once you are part of something big, you’ll get people interested in what you do.
It is possible to get the attention of customers; you just need to know how to do it right.
1) Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez | Listen to my interview with Cindy here
2) It’s Not The How Or The What But The Who by Claudio Fernandez-Araoz | Listen to my interview with Claudio here
3) A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger | Listen to my interview with Warren here
4) Traction – A Startup Guide To Getting Customers by Justin Mares | Listen to my interview with Justin here
5) The Seven Levels of Communication by Michael J. Maher | Listen to my interview with Michael here
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Lean Customer Development according to Cindy Alvarez Introduction Lean Customer Development shows you why you need customer development and its set toRead More
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]]>Lean Customer Development shows you why you need customer development and its set to arm you with the facts you need to overcome the initial resistance that you might get from your organization. Cindy Alvarez teaches you that customers don’t always know what they want but they can’t hide what they need. Her book provides you with the real questions you need to be asking customers in order to figure out their problems and needs.
I was seeing that when people were going out to talk to customers they had a bunch of steps to follow but didn’t know what to do when there was something different. They were hearing what they should do but really needed to hear how they should do it and why it works. I realized that people need to have that level of understanding.
The one concept that the readers should take away from this book is that customers don’t always know what they want but they can’t hide what they need. It’s just a matter of asking those questions to figure out their problems.
The book starts with why you need customer development and its set to arm people with the facts they need to overcome the initial resistance that they might get from their organization. Costumer development can sometimes feel like a challenge to an organization and they might feel like they don’t need it but everyone does. The next step is writing your ideas down and forming them into a hypothesis that is very easy to test and prove or disprove. The last getting started thing is what I call mapping your target customer profile. Once you have these exercises in hand you have a sense that you got something that you can prove or disprove. After this people want to know who they should be talking to and how they can find them. I describe how you are going to think about those target customers, how you’re going to find them and how you’re going to get them to talk to you. When you find people that have a problem that they want solve they will talk to you. Once you’ve got those people you need to know what you should be learning and what you should be asking them. The best questions tend to be narrative, open ended and what you are looking for is not specifically the answer to a question but you want to know about their existing behaviors. What is frustrating them right now? All of that is the startup and preparation.
After that are the actual interview and a play by play of a successful customer interview. I give a lot of great tips for you to get prepared, for you to start off the conversation correctly and to make it clear that this is about your target customer talking. It’s not a sales pitch, not about you telling people what they should do, it’s really about telling them about the way your world works today. In customer development you want to know what these people do when you’re not looking.
After the interviews the next thing is what you do with it. I go through and talk a lot about how to interpret what people are saying, how to look for patterns. So these first seven chapters will work for anyone, any company of any size.
The last part of the book is about how to do this within larger enterprise’s, within conservative or regulated industries. It’s about how customer development works when you already have customers and you already have products. I’ll talk about expectations but within your work and your customers. How you can find the right customers that already exist to test out your ideas on. I’m also going to talk about how you do this when you don’t have a lot of time set aside. I talk about how you fit costumer development into your everyday routine and how you use your interactions that you already have with them to gain more insights.
Finally there is an appendix of questions that work. These are questions that I have used over the last 10 years. If you are wondering what questions you should be asking, this will be really helpful to use as a reference.
“If your customer tells you maybe, write that down as no.” – Cindy Alvarez
I have been working at startups for the past 15 years and a couple years ago the startup I was at was acquired by Microsoft so now I also have some experience working within an extremely large company. In working with those companies of all sizes I saw that people were struggling to talk to their customers so figured I should write a book about it. I have written the book Lean Customer Development to give companies of all sizes a practical guide to get people talking to customers and challenging their ideas.
Companies know that they should be forming hypothesis and validating them, but what I have seen is that companies are trying to do that validation with a really outdated tool box. Companies used to use analysis reports, focus groups and those used to work in a world where software was released on 3 , 5 and 10 year cycles but they are just too slow for people to use today. We have companies who want to talk to their customers, who want to challenge their ideas but they aren’t really sure how. I wanted to make sure that they had a guide so that they can read the book and feel comfortable enough doing this.
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
Buy Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez on Amazon today
Visit LeanCustomerDevelopment.com to learn more about Cindy and her book
Follow and engage with Cindy Alvarez on Twitter
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg | Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want by Alexander Osterwalder | Moving Targets with Gabriel Aluisy
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Simple Ways Entrepreneurs Can Attract Customers
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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