“Not me! I want to be as easy and painless as possible”, I said.
But was that really true? Against my wishes for easy sales and marketing, I was doing a number of things to make it harder, instead of easier:
- I didn’t have a clear niche where I was the 800lb gorilla. Instead, I had a number of niches that I “competed” in, meaning I wasted a lot of time on sales cycles that I had a very low chance of winning.
- Because of #1, I didn’t have clear messaging, which made it harder for my ideal prospects to seek me out and for me to help them understand why they might want to be become clients.
- This is the same as #2, but I want to create a separate point for it– because the same problem applied to my partner network. I couldn’t empower my virtual sales team. This is typically the biggest source of business for solo consultants– make sure you nurture it.
- Ineffective follow-up. I used enterprise CRMs like my big corporate clients. These tools had lots of features, but their purpose was to help the VP of sales track the sales team, not help me follow up with prospects and partners. These are transactional systems that don’t track referrals and default to “never talk to this person again”, rather than “talk to this person every 90 days”, or some other reasonable default. So many opportunities slipped away because I didn’t follow up.
- My website was a shingle, not a front-line sales assistant that would convert visitors to leads (and leads to conversations, via the right kind of lead magnet).
Naturally, Mimiran helps with all of these issues– no reason to struggle the way I did– from finding your niche, to honing your message, to following up with partners and prospects. (Start a free trial.)
After all, this isn’t the Olympics– you don’t get extra points for a higher degree of difficulty.