"If you want to accelerate and boost your sales, the best thing you can do is show your clients and prospects. Don't tell what you can help them with. Show them."
Thought leadership marketing. What is that?
Well, I have good news and I have bad news. Really, that’s the only kind of marketing that’s left. Everything that we used to call marketing and sales, spray and pray, batch and blast – most of my clients hate doing that kind of marketing. In fact, the consistent theme that I hear is “David, I love my work. I love my clients. I just don’t like the marketing and sales part.”
Well, I have great news. If that’s you, you can replace the words ‘marketing’ and ‘sales’ with four new words. The four new words are ‘offer value’ and ‘invite engagement’.
We work with speakers, consultants, coaches, and experts who want to speak more profitably. Marketing today is about being a trusted advisor. It’s really about serving before selling. It’s about helping before pitching. Everything that you do to prove to your client that you are the right choice.
When I started my business, I made every mistake in the book. I made the good ones twice.
I wanted to work with speakers and experts and thought leaders who are in a similar position to me when I started my speaking driven business, to help them shortcut the mistakes, avoid the potholes, not hit the same brick walls and the same dead ends that I did, so that everything that we do is really about coaching them, mentoring them, and helping them shave years off their learning curve.
Marketing needs to be easy, effortless, and enjoyable because that’s the only way it’s going to be effective.
If you do marketing tasks that you hate, you’re never going to end up doing the right kind of marketing. So if you love writing strategies, use writing. If you love speaking strategies, use speaking. If you love tech, use tech. If you love networking, shaking hands and kissing babies, please use networking strategies.
But you have to do marketing, rain or shine, happy or sad, feel like it or not because that’s what’s going to help you ring the cash register.
The most common symptoms of the folks that we work with is they’ve noticed some fee stagnation, they’re not as successful as they would like to be or they’re not as successful as they would like to be as quickly as they would like to be.
For some of our folks, it’s often not their first rodeo, so they’ve hired other coaches, they’ve hired other mentors, they’ve bought other courses and programs, and they come to us a little bit jaded, a little bit burned out, a little disappointed, wondering is this really gonna work this time? And those are the folks that when they commit, when they do the work, they get amazing, incredible results.
Let me tell you a story about my client, Nancy. Nancy lives up in Buffalo, New York. She’s a brilliant speaker. She was complaining to me one day, David, I can’t get out of Buffalo. All I’m getting is these low fee and no fee gigs. I’m down at the chamber for $300, I’m down at the ladies auxiliary for $200, I’m in the church basement for $250. I told her, I said, “Nancy, the fact that all you’re finding is these low fee and no fee gigs, that’s not the problem. The problem is that you’re taking them.”
Never let anyone’s budget determine your value or your fee.
- They want to raise their visibility
- They want to raise their credibility
- They want to raise their buy-ability and get more and better checks in the door as fast as possible.
If you want to accelerate and boost your sales, the best thing you can do is show your clients and prospects. Don’t tell what you can help them with. Show them.
If you want to maximize profits, you have to position your products and services so that they will shorten the path and accelerate the speed to get your clients the outcomes they already know they want. We are no longer in the convincing and persuading business. We are in the filtering and sorting business.
“Everything he says, I want to write it all down and I bring so much back with me to work on. I could stay busy working on his stuff forever.”
“David was fantastic, a whole new way of thinking about marketing. I need to go back and rethink my business.”
“David is a seasoned speaker, he’s unbelievable. He’s very passionate about what he does. He truly wants you to be better. At the same time, he’s going to hold you accountable.”
“David has a great insight, energy, passion around marketing like I haven’t seen anybody else ever have.”
“David is amazing and I’ll tell you, he’s got so many great stories that are applicable and you’re so excited, you want to immediately go home and apply them.”
So no matter what, it’s really about reaching the next level of professional success and getting premium checks from premium clients.
Marketing today is about 3PR – personalized, professional public relations. Those are three components. It is speaking to build your visibility. It is publishing to build your credibility and it is digital marketing to build your share-ability. If you nail those three things, you’ve got more visibility, credibility, and share-ability. You win.
At Do It! Marketing, we help speakers, consultants, and experts to simplify their speaking-driven business, boost their impact and increase their income by $15K-$25K per month (or more) faster than they ever thought possible.
If that’s something you’re interested in, reach out and schedule a free speaker strategy call with our team at www.doitmarketing.com/call
On the call, we’ll help you get total clarity on the business model, speaking model, and revenue model you really want, how to create it by reaching the exact clients and audiences who matter, and how to fix what’s not working right now with your positioning, packaging, marketing, prospecting, outreach, and sales so that you improve your results FAST.
Go to www.doitmarketing.com/call and we’ll craft a plan to help you speak more profitably.
