Big Dreams and Hard Work

by Gail Z. Martin

Looking for more professional visibility and a more prominent professional platform, with a way to connect with a steady stream of potential new clients?

Time to take a second look at blogging and LinkedIn.

I want to show you how blogging and LinkedIn can enhance your professional visibility and build a strong professional platform, which can produce a steady stream of qualified prospective customers. But before I get to that part, let me knock a few misconceptions out of the park so they don’t get in the way.

Out with the Old

Misconception #1: My type of clients aren’t on the Internet.

Answer: Unless they’re dead, incarcerated or incapacitated, they are on the Internet. According to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Internet Project, 87% of Americans use the Internet. And no, they’re not all teens. The report says that 93% of adults ages 30 – 49 are Internet users, 88% of those 50-64, and 57% of those ages 65+. Usage increases with education level and income, so 97% of those with a college education are online, as are 99% of those earning over $75,000. (Details here: https://www.pewinternet.org/data-trend/internet-use/latest-stats/)

Misconception #2: I can’t be on the Internet because I can’t give free advice.

Answer: What’s free advice got to do with it? You have a phone, and you don’t give free advice over it. You have a mailbox and you don’t give free advice. The Internet is a communication tool. You choose what you communicate.

Misconception #3: I prefer to get warm referrals from clients.

Answer: Who doesn’t? But are you getting enough of those warm referrals to pay your bills? If you could use some more business, increasing your professional visibility and creating a solid professional expert platform goes a long way toward bringing in new paying customers.

Misconception #4: Internet referrals wouldn’t be as high quality.

Answer: Lawyers advertise in magazines, on billboards and bus boards, in newspapers, on TV and on the radio. The general public sees those ads. In contrast, online readers must possess expensive technology in the form of a smart phone, tablet/laptop/desktop computer and Internet connection—a form of filtering you don’t get in other types of advertising.

In with the New

Now that we’ve gotten those misconceptions out of the way, let me tell you what social media—in particular, blogging and LinkedIn–can do for you.

Let’s start with blogging. Blogging is like a cross between a newsletter and a website. It’s like a newsletter because you can easily update it with text and photos without needing a programmer to make the changes. It’s like a website because it’s on the Internet and searchable by Google and other search engines.

Most blogging platforms are free, although you’ll want to check the terms and conditions to make sure the site accepts commercial content. WordPress is popular because it’s easy to use, free to use, and doesn’t have restrictions on commercial usage.

What do you do on a blog? You educate. And by educating, you show yourself to be an expert. Readers come to like your voice and trust your wisdom. They may even share links to your blog posts with their friends (referrals) and when the time comes to hire someone, you’ll be first in line because you’ve created a relationship.

Isn’t educating the same as free advice? No! Educating means talking in generalities about legal topics, sharing links to research studies and news of interest to your audience, reflecting on the general impact of new laws, legal trends and other issues. Have you ever given a talk to a local Chamber of Commerce or community group about your legal specialty? If so, then you’ve created the kind of content that is perfect for a blog—useful information that is not revealing confidential information or commenting on an individual’s situation. In fact, if you’ve given a lot of those kinds of talks, you can re-use your old speeches for blog posts and save yourself some time.

What about the comment section? Won’t people ask questions you can’t/don’t want to answer? Well, does that ever happen to you when you’re out in public or at a social occasion? How do you handle it then? See, you already know what to do. I would suggest having a permanent header and/or footer disclaimer on your blog making it clear that you cannot comment on individual situations, are not dispensing legal advice, etc. (You know how to write that up—you’re a lawyer!) Then if someone oversteps, politely but firmly point them to the rules and go on with what you were discussing.

What do you talk about? Start with the types of general questions you get most often. These will seem basic to you, but if people already knew the answers, they wouldn’t keep asking. Depending on your type of legal expertise, these Frequently Asked Questions are pretty general, things like: “Who needs a will?”; “What does a trust really do?”, etc. Think education, not advice. Readers will self-filter as they read through the information to determine whether or not they need your area of expertise.

What about referrals? How long do you have to blog before you start getting new business? I recommend clients view blogging the same way they view membership/attendance at community organizations and the Chamber of Commerce. You might get lucky and get a new client or a hot prospect the first time you attend a meeting, but more than likely, it will take several months for people to get to know you or to have a life event that requires your services. Blogging isn’t a magic bullet, but neither are the other types of real-world relationship-building/meet-new-people events you are already doing. It’s one more power tool in your toolbox.

Worried that you’re going to get prospects from outside your practice area? Don’t be. After all, you have a phone but you aren’t getting swamped with long-distance calls from China. Make your practice specialties and coverage area clear on your “About Me” page, and that should avoid the issue.

There are a lot more visibility strategies I share with professional clients about blogging, but in the interest of covering ground quickly, it’s time to move on to LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the most powerful professional networking tool on the Internet. It’s not a site where you go to meet new people; instead, it’s the perfect way to keep your network of connections warm and updated, so you can be more valuable to each other.

Have you ever needed an introduction to someone or a piece of information and you know the perfect person to ask, but it’s awkward because you haven’t spoken to that person in a couple of years? LinkedIn solves that problem, because the site makes it easy to get a constant stream of updates about all the people you list as Connections, so you can congratulate them on promotions or awards, comment on their professional news, and keep your name top of mind in a warm, friendly way.

LinkedIn is also a great way to generate warm introductions to people you need to meet. Suppose there is someone in the business community you’ve wanted to meet but whom you don’t know. LinkedIn will tell you whether that person is known by any of the people you’ve accepted as Connections. Now it’s simple to ask the person you already know and whom you’re connected to on LinkedIn for a warm introduction to the person they know and you want to meet. You do this all the time in real life, but offline, you don’t always know who knows whom. LinkedIn may surprise you by showing that the people you want to meet are closer than “six degrees of separation”!

LinkedIn groups are a great way to join or start a forum to discuss professional topics. (Again, in an educational sense, not advising.) It’s no different from showing up to a lecture or professional association meeting on a topic except that you don’t have to drive, park and waste an afternoon or evening in a drafty hotel ballroom. Not only can LinkedIn groups be a great way to meet professionals related to your field, they can also be a source of referrals as people get to know/like/trust the expertise you show through your posts and responses.

I recommend to clients that they not accept anyone as a LinkedIn Connection whom they do not know well enough to meet for coffee and refer to colleagues. The quality of your LinkedIn networking lies in deepening existing relationships and keeping those relationships warm. Not only that, but your Connections can see who else you are connected to. They can also ask you for a warm introduction. You wouldn’t be comfortable introducing a total stranger to a trusted colleague, or asking a stranger for an introduction. That’s why you want to make sure you know the people with whom you connect well enough to share that kind of information.

Don’t feel pressured to have a huge number of Connections on LinkedIn. Remember: quality counts more than quantity. Your network of trusted colleagues with whom you have built warm reciprocal relationships is much more powerful than a hodgepodge of total strangers.

Once again, this brief overview can’t cover all of the relationship-building/referral strategies I suggest to clients who use LinkedIn. However, I do hope that what I’ve shared in this short introduction has changed the way you think about using the Internet as a tool to increase your professional visibility, extend your personal branding and expert platform, deepen your networking relationships and create a new referral stream.

Just remember—your ideal prospects are already using social media to find information and connect with professionals like yourself. If you’re not engaging them in a relationship-building conversation, odds are that your competition is.

by Gail Z. Martin

Do you know why people don’t ask for help when they need it?  Why someone would continue on, in pain, watching their business fail…and not ask for help?

There are usually two reasons: They are ashamed to ask for help, and they’re afraid to spend money.

Often, people won’t ask for help until they’ve tried to do everything themselves and it didn’t work and now they’re really, really scared and their back is against the wall.  And that’s a shame.

So how do you turn that around?

With stories.  Make sure your stories make it easy for people to see themselves doing what the clients in your stories have done. Knowing that other people have faced those problems and asked for help makes it easier for your clients to do the same. Not only that, but social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest and YouTube are fantastic places to share your stories.

And when your clients see an outcome in your story that they want for themselves, money stops being an issue. It’s that simple.

by Gail Z. Martin

Adele and her husband had worked very hard to build a wireless telecom business and it was growing.  But she wanted to find a way to stay in touch with her customers between orders, so they would be the first people those customers would call the next time they needed more supplies.

But because of the nature of their kind of business, that created a problem on social media because Adele didn’t want to be talking about rates and industry gossip.  Those things were very sensitive.  That information was proprietary. And she was afraid that they wouldn’t be able to have a Facebook page because of it.

And it was driving Adele crazy.  When she came to me, she said, “I know we need to be on Facebook, but I don’t want people talking business.  How do we get our customers together and not talk shop?”

So I asked Adele to tell me about the business she and her husband had built.  I was really impressed. And one of the things that impressed me the most was what they did at the holidays.

Every year, instead of sending out cookies or wine baskets, Adele and her husband would select a business book that they had found meaningful and send that book to all their clients, with a note about how it meant a lot to them and they hoped it would help the client’s business.

I got chills down my back.  I jumped up and started pacing like I’d just downed a couple of Red Bulls.  And I said—“That’s it!”

Adele’s customers all knew about the gift books.  That was a story they were familiar with.

So Adele created a Facebook page where she invited all her customers to come have a discussion about the book and what it meant to them.  No talking shop, no spilling the beans on sensitive pricing….the story was all about the books.

In other words, Adele was able to create a way for her to have an ongoing conversation with her customers to keep the relationship warm between sales. That’s essential, because if your buyers only need your product a few times a year, no matter how much they like you they can forget about you if months pass without hearing from you.

And when the relationship goes cold, it gets harder for your customers to get past the twin obstacles of not wanting to ask for help and being afraid to spend money. These two obstacles are the biggest speedbumps to getting prospects to move past window-shopping to make a purchase.

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by Gail Z. Martin

Using all that alphabet-soup of abbreviations and acronyms can get you into trouble!

I saw this happen when I was in an elevator in downtown Charlotte.  We were in a high-rise building, not too long after 9/11.  And we were all there in our business suits, riding upstairs, and two guys behind me start talking.

One guys says, “Oh geez, Jim—did you get the BOM?”

The other guy says, “I don’t have the BOM, Pete.  I thought you had the BOM?”

Well it got really quiet in that elevator.  We were all holding our breaths.  I could see that people were doing these nervous little glances to the side.  I thought maybe someone would tackle these two guys.

And then I looked down and I saw that the men standing behind Jim and Pete had Men-In-Black-style government issue shoes….and I remembered that the FBI had an office in our building, and they also have the best roller shutters for security from https://aluminium-shopfronts.co.uk/blog/.

Apparently, that’s when Pete and Jim remembered, too.  And Pete said….”Uh, we work for First Union’s Accounts Payable department and that’s a Bill of Materials…..B-O-M…..paperwork, you know?”

It’s a lot funnier now than it was at the time…and I bet Pete and Jim never forgot it, either! But it goes to show you what kind of trouble industry-speak can get you into.

by Gail Z. Martin

Do you make it hard for people to do business with you?

Are your prospects easily able to figure out what you do and how it would help them solve their problems?

In my experience, businesses often lose sales because prospects aren’t entirely sure what services the business provides and how those services can make a direct impact on the customer’s bottom line. If your customers don’t see immediately how they can see a big positive impact, they won’t buy.

One of the ways businesses often unintentionally turn off interested prospects is with industry jargon and buzzwords. Buzzwords are buzzkill. They make people’s eyes glaze over if they do know what the words mean, and they’re just blah-blah-blah to people who don’t know them. Not only that, but buzzwords have been so overused that they become meaningless.

Compare this “We help you prioritize management objectives to optimize your metrics with impactful outcomes” to this: “We help you create an action list to get big, measurable results.”

Which one makes you more willing to buy?

Don’t make your customers, your Facebook friends, your YouTube watchers have to look up what you say in the dictionary or skip over unfamiliar words. In other words…..don’t use jargon.

Now I know sometimes you’re not even aware when you start talking in buzz words.  After all, everyone you work with probably uses the same secret language.  Abbreviations, acronyms, industry-speak words… those are great when you’re talking to your colleagues, but they leave customers confused.

Confused customers don’t buy.

Not only that, but when people are confused, they’ve lost track of what you can do for them, what problem you solve, what benefit you provide.  They don’t know what you do…so they walk away.

by Gail Z. Martin

Results Envy occurs when your prospect sees the outcome you have delivered to your customer and wants it so badly it makes his/her teeth hurt.

Compelling case studies deliver Results Envy when you tell a story that draws the prospect in, evokes emotions and delivers a story that engages emotion.

See, Results Envy works because as human beings, we’re wired for stories. Since the first cavemen crouched around a campfire and shared ghost stories or hunting stories or myths of how the world came to be, we have learned that stories are important for survival.

You see, we are wired for stories. It’s how we learn. It’s how we come to understand the world around us, who we are, where we belong, and what’s possible.  The stories we tell—in our families, our communities, our houses of worship, our countries—they give us a sense of identity and they give us our sense of how the world works.

That’s why it’s so risky to decide that you don’t need to tell stories. See facts are good, there’s a place for a list of features and benefits, but that’s not where the big hurdle is to bring people to ‘yes’. It doesn’t happen in the frontal lobes, where the logical thinking occurs. It happens in the lizard brain, the old brain, the amygdala, where everything is driven by emotion. Fight or flight. Friend of enemy. Food or predator. Mate or threat. That’s the old brain, and it still plays a big part in how we made decisions. It’s the shadow brain, the one that tells us what to be afraid of, the part of our brain that worries in the middle of the night. Satisfy the lizard brain, and you make the sale.

Case studies can evoke Results Envy better than testimonials.

Testimonials are about the ending. That’s all. They talk about the outcome, but not the journey. They’re short, and we don’t get to know the person giving the testimonial. They could be anyone. We don’t know what they’ve gone through, why the outcome mattered, what was on the line. It’s like reading the last page of a book or watching the last scene of a movie.

There’s a place for testimonials. But testimonials serve as post-purchase reinforcement or pre-purchase encouragement, they don’t make the sale. Case studies—stories—make the sale.

Case studies also overcome the ego/budget factor to create Results Envy.

I want you to realize that you don’t sell services. You don’t sell products. You sell solutions to problems.

If you’re a consultant, you help people figure out what they can’t figure out on their own. If you sell a product, you provide a tool to people to do something they can’t do without your tool. And that’s the problem. Your customer has to admit to being a failure before they are willing to buy your product or services.

Most people won’t buy a solution to their problem until they have tried to fix it themselves. Either they don’t want to spend the money (budget) or they don’t want to admit they can’t do it alone (ego). Think about the last time something broke at your house. Whether it was a clogged drain or a glitch garage door, I bet you tried at least once—maybe more—to fix it yourself before you called in a professional or went out to Lowe’s or Home Depot to buy a replacement.

Why? Because you didn’t want to spend the money, and you figured ‘it can’t be that hard.’ Am I right? You know that’s how we do things.

But the truth is, we try to fix it ourselves. We duct tape things together for as long as we can. We work around the broken part until we can’t stand it anymore, or until it doesn’t work at all, or until someone else refuses to put up with it and makes us do something about it.

We have to fail before we’re ready to buy—and we have to admit to ourselves that we have failed. That hurts. We don’t like that. In fact, we’ll try really hard not to come to that conclusion. And that’s why people put off buying your products and services.

They’re not ready to fail. They’re not ready to admit that they can’t do it themselves if they try a little harder or a little longer. They’re not ready to put away the duct tape and admit it’s really broken.

Case studies—stories—make it easier for them to get past the ego/budget factor by showing them what happened to someone else. Someone who had a problem just like theirs. Someone just like them. Someone with the same fears and hopes, who was in a lot of trouble, like them, until they saw the light. Someone who trusted you and your product or service to help, and then got the jackpot, got the solution and peace of mind and money and good night’s sleep and no more acid reflux. And when they get to that point in the story, they’ve got Results Envy and they want what you’ve got more than they want their pride and more than they want their money. And you’ve got a customer.

Now the fourth reason you want Results Envy is because it helps to validate Return on Investment.

For 99% of us, money is finite. There isn’t enough to do everything, so it’s a constant series of trade-offs. Do I buy this because if I do, I can’t buy that. Invest here? If so, can’t invest there. Always an opportunity cost, something you miss out on because you did something else and you can’t do both.

So if you want a customer to spend money with you, that’s money they can’t spend on something else. So not only do you have to get them past that ego/sticker-price issue, you’ve also get them to want what you’ve got to offer more than what they’re passing up to get it.

How do you do that? With Results Envy.

When your prospect wants the outcome so much that he or she can taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it, and imagine themselves living with the solution to their problem, he will validate the ROI to himself. You won’t have to do it. Your prospect will argue themselves into the purchase. She’ll talk herself out of her objections, because she is already sold on the outcome.

Results Envy will make the ROI argument for you.

Write your case studies with Results Envy in mind, and see the difference it makes turning prospects into customers!

by Gail Z. Martin

Social media plays a key role in funding a successful Kickstarter. That’s one reason anthologies do well, because they are a team effort and appeal to the readership of a dozen or more authors. On the other hand, I’ve seen individual authors and product developers also successfully Kickstart their projects by reaching out to their personal networks through social media and encouraging friends to tell friends.

Friends telling friends is really the secret to funding a Kickstarter, and it’s the essence of viral or word-of-mouth marketing. The more friends you can connect with early and often on social media, the more active you and they are in spreading the word, and the more interconnected interested parties are in talking up the project, the more buzz is in the marketplace and the more people find the project and contribute.

For example, the Kickstarter anthology project included seventeen original authors. Most were already active on Facebook or Twitter. The authors immediately liked, friended and followed each other so they could retweet, share, like and comment on each other’s posts about the project. The Kickstarter also had a Facebook fan page, a Facebook event page, a Tumblr page, Twitter hashtags, Pinterest posts, a YouTube video and a Goodreads event. Authors and their friends talked it up on all those social media sites plus others like Reddit and Google+, and reached out to bloggers, podcasters and book review sites. They kept up a constant flow of commentary, banter, witty repartee and flat-out asking for funding for 29 days, often interacting with each other in real-time on multiple platforms at once.  (And should you think the authors were all twenty-somethings, the average age was 40+).   Kickstarter needs constant buzz.  It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it medium.

Kickstarter creates an exciting opportunity to reach what pundits call the “Long Tail” of customers. The “long tail” refers to the trail of a comet, which stretches on for a long, long time beyond the comet itself. The marketing theory around the “long tail” holds that there are viable niche markets that often go untapped because they are too small to be profitable for the business models of very large companies, but which can provide a very nice living for entrepreneurs or small, efficient companies that can tap that niche and provide a desired outcome.

Thinking about bringing your product to market but stymied on funding? Take a look at Kickstarter. But remember, what appears to be just a funding mechanism is really an endeavor that requires a lively network, a clear concept, a niche audience and a lot of marketing mojo.