I like to think I’m a pretty good marketer of my professional services.After all, I’ve been at it for 34 years, read hundreds of marketing books, thousands of articles and studied with the very best marketing gurus.But marketing is still challenging for me and the majority of independent professionals. If it weren’t, we’d all have more clients than we could serve, they’d be paying us high fees, and we’d never having to worry where our next clients would come from.And we wouldn’t need the thousands of marketing coaches and consultants like me offering services of all kinds to help you attract more clients.So, why is marketing so challenging?There are many marketing challenges, however, if you look at marketing closely, there are actually only three big challenges that give us the most trouble.Learn how to meet those challenges and your marketing will become more successful, easier, and fun.Here are those three marketing challenges:Challenge #1. Clearly communicating the value of what you are offering. Someone will not buy your services if they don’t see the real value to them. Your message can’t be vague or confusing; it must be clear and beneficial.One way to zero in on the value of your service is to define the top three attributes your service possesses. One or two is not enough; five or six tends to dilute your message.So, for instance, a sales training company might want to emphasize that their training is guaranteed to increase sales, improve sales confidence quickly, and can be delivered virtually in 45-minute online modules.That’s easy to understand and obviously beneficial. That kind of clear and valuable message is likely to generate attention, interest, and response.Seems simple, but not so easy to do. In my experience with thousands of independent professionals, their messages tend to be vague, not specific, and weak in terms of value.And if that value is not clear, prospects won’t respond.Taking the time to work on your message, fine-tune it, and test it until it gets a favorable response is one of the most important things you can possibly do in your business.To succeed at this task you must get inside the heads of your ideal clients and ask what they want the most, what problems they struggle with frequently, what isn’t working for them, and what could make their jobs easier and more productive.Jaynie L. Smith of Smart Advantage consulting says that 90% of companies don’t really know what their clients value the most. No wonder marketing messages are so bad.You can improve your marketing messages by reading and research (ask Google), sending questionnaires to your clients (Survey Monkey), or conducting a virtual focus group (via Zoom Video). Ultimately, you want to find out their biggest challenges and what they value the most.When you have that marketing intelligence, it will be a lot easier to come up with powerful marketing messages.This is challenging because it takes time and deep thinking. But if you realize its importance, you’ll invest your energies to come up with a powerful message that makes your service attractive, interesting, and compelling to your ideal clients.Challenge # 2. Making your business visible with repeated impressions of your message over time. It can take several impressions before someone responds to your marketing message.Just today, I noticed a message that one of my first level connections had sent to me on LinkedIn. When I checked the message, I noticed that he had sent me a total of 13 messages over a one-year period.The messages were actually very good. They had the right tone and great calls-to-action. It’s just that I don’t pay a lot of attention to my LinkedIn messages and had completely missed the first 12!He understood the value of repeat impressions over time and had developed a system within LinkedIn that had enabled him to send a unique, personalized message every month for a year. Pretty impressive.If he had only sent one or two messages, the chances are good that I wouldn’t have seen them.Again, my experience with the majority of self-employed professionals is that their marketing visibility is, at best, random and inconsistent, and at worst, non-existent.As you may know, I’ve sent out an email newsletter to my list pretty much every week for 21 years. That’s visibility. It’s really quite simple, but not so easy.If you want to be effective at your marketing, you must identify marketing strategies that enable you to get your message in front of your prospective clients consistently.And again, this is challenging. What is the best marketing activity for you, your personality and talents? How can you fit something into your schedule and do it consistently, not for a few weeks but for years?The question is not just what marketing strategies to use. Networking, speaking, blogging, email newsletters, webinars, social media, and direct outreach can all work.The more important question is what strategies will work the best for you and how exactly you can implement those strategies without spinning your wheels.You’re looking for proven, step-by-step instructions so you can evaluate if a strategy is right for you and something you can fit into your schedule on a regular basis. Remember, sporadic implementation is a waste of time.Implementing visibility strategies takes commitment and persistence. Is growing and succeeding in your business important enough for you to make that kind of effort? If it is, you’ll succeed at finding the best strategy for you.The final challenge may be the most important of all to overcome.Challenge #3. Maintaining the right marketing attitude and mindset over time, despite setbacks. If you can’t maintain The 3 R’s of success – responsibility, resourcefulness, and resilience, your marketing will never achieve the results you want.These 3Rs are absolutely essential. Responsibility is the stance that the buck stops with you. You are the only one who will find a way to attract clients and you won’t give up until you find that way. You won’t make excuses or blame circumstances, but instead will be accountable for making results happen.Resourcefulness is the skill to utilize your talents, and abilities to quickly find smart ways to overcome difficulties and find solutions. And to be resourceful, you can’t be full of doubts and fears of failure or rejection. A responsible person commits to finding a way; a resourceful person tries every way possible until they discover the best way.Resilience may be the most powerful trait of all. It’s what enables you to bounce back from adversity, setbacks, and even failures. And if you’re working to attract great clients, you’ll inevitably experience all of those many times. People who are not resilient don’t even try, let alone succeed.All of these essential qualities are in short supply. But if you work to grow those qualities persistently, over time, they will help you succeed with the first two challenging things in marketing – messaging and visibility.Despite these three marketing challenges – messaging, visibility, and mindset – there is good news.Improving your skills or abilities – even a little – in any of these three challenge areas will increase your marketing effectiveness.There is no perfect way of tackling all three challenges and you can’t do it in big leaps that get you there overnight. But you can work on all three slowly, with persistence, making small gains every week.When you improve your messages, you’ll start to see a better response in communicating to your prospects. Marketing then becomes like a game that starts with the question, “How can I communicate my value more clearly and powerfully?”When you increase your visibility, you’ll also notice a better response because to some degree, marketing is a numbers game. Your question might be, “How can I get my message in front of more of the right people this month?”And when you enhance your responsibility, resourcefulness, and resilience, you’ll find that playing the game becomes easier and more fun. The 3Rs are the fuel that enables you to persist with the first two challenges.Where do you start?You start by admitting where you are now and then committing to a purpose (your WHY for being in business in the first place), a goal (a specific thing you want to achieve), and to taking action (the actual steps you’ll implement to get there).Yes, marketing is challenging. But meeting those challenges is absolutely worth it.Cheers, Robert
Romance in the Law Office
We’ve all heard tales of office Christmas parties that ran amuck. Coworkers get caught making out in the copy room or a storage closet. Reports of after-hours office frolicking run like wildfire through the halls and floors of businesses. These shenanigans occur in all types of companies.Office romance isn’t only the tipsy pawing of revelers. Coworkers date. They even marry.Does office romance negatively affect office atmosphere and the service provided? I’d like to share a work story, and you can tell me if you think office romance is detrimental.One time, at band camp…no, not really, but it definitely left me feeling LIKE I was at bamp camp…For a time, I worked for a satellite office of a large law firm. I was the legal secretary for a husband and wife team. Being assigned to two attorneys married to each other was…interesting, to say the least. The entire staff could tell in the first two minutes on Monday mornings how their weekends went. If it had been a bad weekend, I was offered condolences.The thermostat which controlled both of their offices was located in husband-attorney’s office. My desk was conveniently across from their doors. One particular “bad weekend” Monday morning, Mrs. Attorney came out to my station and said, “Would you tell HIM to turn up the heat, I’m cold,” and returned immediately to her office, shutting the door firmly behind her.I stopped typing, fully aware that our close proximity created the strong likelihood that Mr. Attorney had already heard what she said. I was also aware that the secretary behind me had stopped typing as well. The day’s antics had begun.I stood up, smoothed my blouse, and ventured into Mr. Attorney’s office. He was typing and didn’t immediately acknowledge my presence. Finally, he said, “…yes?” I dutifully delivered the message. Silence reigned. Well, silence reigned in those four walls. I heard shuffling and whispers as staff began clustering near my station.Mr. Attorney swiveled his chair to face me, peering at me over his glasses. “Do tell, if you will, my lovely wife that if she had dressed appropriately for the weather, she wouldn’t now be complaining that she is cold.”Silence reigned everywhere.I walked out of his office. Exchanging glances with my coworkers who were poised to scatter but too curious to immediately beat a retreat, I veered right and knocked on Mrs. Attorney’s door. I gained entrance, and dutifully delivered the quoted reply. Silence reigned again. Coworker shuffling had ceased at that point. All ears were at attention.Mrs. Attorney said, in a voice an octave higher, “Will you please inform him that my state of dress is none of his business and that if he ignores a reasonable request it will not bode well this evening.”I returned to Mr. Attorney’s doorway, repeating Mrs. Attorney’s words. His response was, “All reasonable requests are considered. It is the unreasonable requests that are denied, in toto.”I updated Mrs. Attorney and announced that I was going back to my desk, to work (while wondering if emphasis on “work” filtered through).My fingers typed senseless words on the screen as the thermostat dance began. She walked in his office, flipped the control and went back into her office. The sound of the heat kicking in muted the return of coworker shuffling. They backed away but remained a rapt audience.His chair squeaked as he got up, turned the heat off, and sat down with more squeaking.Heels clicked (which was pretty amazing since the floors were carpeted) as she made another control-flipping appearance.I chose to take my morning break earlier than usual that morning.Yes, I believe office romance definitely affects office atmosphere. Based on my personal observation, it affects client service as well.
Education With Personal Objectives
Most parents do not start their children’s primary education with goals in mind, with personal objectives. But, when general public education began to develop, there were objectives underlying its foundation. Many would suggest that Horace Mann was the founder of the modern public American education system. This statement by no means implies that he was the founder of all educational programs that existed during his primacy, and surely he did not contribute to institutions that preceded him. His focus was upon educating the greater public. Additionally, his strategies served the rapidly developing American Industrial Revolution. The Mann philosophies were implemented to a large degree for the purpose of assuring that our young citizens of European descent were sufficiently educated to both engage in necessary menial tasks, care for the equipment, and to manage the new manufacturing infrastructure developing across our young America.
The Mann-concept based educational system was sufficient to buoy our economy for the primary benefit of the Anglo population and provided a significant edge to this group in conjunction with Jim Crow laws that legislated separate and scarcely ever equal systems for people of all other colors. Additionally, because World Wars I, II, and subsequent major wars in Asia also decimated competitive industrial and knowledge assets, as well as trained labor forces in Europe and Asia through the mid-1970′s, America thrived. However, since then, America has suffered losses in superiority in manufacturing processes, technology, education delivery. Additionally, we never elected to develop a rich common culture by which to bond citizens. As such, the United States economic machine has surrendered much of its superiority to others internationally.
With nationalism scarcely an hors-d’oeuvre on their menu, in favor of profit, a host of large American companies have elected to take their manufacturing facilities to foreign countries for the benefit of lower employee wage costs, easier access to production materials, less critical environmental regulations, and lower tax burdens. Not only does this take money out of our country, but many thousands of jobs are lost to international populations annually. Sometimes companies simply contract for services to be performed abroad that could employ and feed thousands of Americans very handsomely. And, to add insult to injury, many American corporations that cannot transfer their work or facilities abroad lobby for and take advantage of legislation that allows foreign nationals to acquire jobs within the continental U.S. (e.g., H1B, and J1 visas). Don’t be fooled by employer outcries suggesting that the jobs cannot be otherwise filled with available citizens. The employers often pay foreign employee counterparts the legal minimum rate, even asking Americans to train them before the Americans are released from their positions.
What this means regarding education is that there is a growing disconnect between employers, and the U.S. educational system (from primary through advanced degrees), with a lesser assurance of the value of any diploma, certificate or degree in the marketplace. A self-serving, liberal arts education narcissist might suggest “We do not educate students to perform tasks. We leave that type of training to trade schools”. Colleges and universities, with their increasing ranges of majors and rising costs, are graduating only fifty percent of those who they admit, and most schools no longer align their curricular objectives with specific needs of the business sector. They no longer promote delivery of market-valuable degrees, rather sell the “opportunity” for students to develop themselves in robust, information based, experience rich environments. So, increasing numbers of students, if graduating from college at all, manage to do so with tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars of school loan debt, diverse experiences, but no job prospects or offers only in the customer service and sales sectors. The jobs attained are often of no relation to that which they studied.
Remember when Aunt Mary would pinch you on your little cheek and ask, “What do want to be when you grow up?” Everyone laughed as you answered in a manner that reflected your very limited exposure to the fact that people “did anything that matters” other than spending time with you. As seemingly unimportant as those scenarios may have appeared, we should be earnestly asking those questions of our children regularly, from an early age. We should provide them with as broad a range of productive options as we can identify in our research. We should enhance their 3R’s (reading, writing and arithmetic) skills as far as we are able (with assistance) as foundations as they also learn to code, play instruments, to compare, contrast, interpret, problem solve, learn to design and handle tools and machines, interact effectively with others, and demand more of the world around them as they grow. We should show them there are demonstrable numbers of cultures and species that share the planet, with diverse world surfaces, deep waters, vast skies, and uncharted space to consider. There are colors, sounds, aromas, textures, flavors, thoughts, and planes of existence beyond our senses. We should emphasize that we vigorously apply ourselves and learn today, tomorrow and the next day so that one day they will be able to select preferred options, not the detritus roles left by others, secondary systems and markets, leftovers for the inadequately prepared. With such perspectives and targets as these, our children will seek a higher level of achievement and experience education with personal objectives.