Hi, my name is Jamie Hill. I am the CEO and chief bearded guru here at beard marketing solutions. Today, I’m actually going to talk to you guys about how to sell your services as well as how to continue adding value to your clients. No matter what, how to imp, and we’re going to give you some tips on how to impress your clients.
We’re going to give you some tips on selling your service, and then we’re going to give you some tips on continuing to add value during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as what’s going to happen after COVID-19. So selling your services, you know, in the beginning of the year, this was a really. Bomb dropper that happened.
You know, we, we were informed that one of the worst pandemics were raging in the world. International borders were being closed and more and more people were getting sick. And then as we went farther and farther into the year, even more harder restrictions got put down, businesses started coming. Closing up their wallets, their pocketbooks, and just really, we’re making a hard decision on if they were going to continue doing business or not.
And if they were what’s going to happen, how is it going to continue contributing to the economy? If it could barely afford to keep its doors open? So expenses were cut. Manpower was laid off. You put on leave. Uh, even unfortunately certain businesses closed down. This really hit our marketplace really hard because most of these companies were the same companies that we did business with and needed to stay in business.
But now they were cutting services. They were really saying, you know what, we can’t afford to continue doing what we’re doing. So unfortunately we’re going to have to cut off. Digital marketing. We’re going to have to shut our sites. Now we’re looking at different ways that we can cut our budget and no longer was it a matter of just, should we keep you it’s how can we afford to keep you when we’re letting go personnel?
We were lucky enough. Very marketing was to not lose any clients or lose very few clients. And in fact, we continue to growing month over month, and here were some of the biggest reasons why when we dealt with our prospects on why we were still able to bring them on over throughout 2020 and why I know that we’ll be continuing to bring them on over 2021 and on.
So one of the very first things that we approached was. Selling services instead of products or selling products instead of services, honestly, people are a harder sell these days services, products. It doesn’t really matter. They’re even harder to sell as well with the way that the finances are for a lot of business owners, they really have to justify it to themselves as well as any potential partners on why they should buy it.
So, what can you guys do to make the sale easier? Stand out from the crowd? So we leveraged one of the facts that we are, we’re a quirky business. Like, if you can’t tell our brand is pilled off of a beard. Now credit mine is much shorter than it used to be, but it used to be much longer. And because of COVID, I ended up cutting it and shaved down and nobody should ever see that.
And if you ever see any photos from that timeframe, Barnum trying to burn them all, but they’re on the internet. So I need your guys’ help with that. But we used our brand and we used her quirkiness. To continue to stand out from the crowd. There is all kinds of marketing companies out there, media buyers, web design companies, but there are few at the time companies that leverage their beard, leverage their teams, beards for the males, leveraged beard nation and the bearded family, you know, so we stood out from the crowd.
We differentiate what made us different from everyone else. And then we took that a step further, and then we started saying, okay, well, great. We’ve got a brain that’s different, but what about our services are different? Why should they hire us? So thanks to a couple of key partners, we really started focusing in, on different things that we could offer that was different from everybody else, things that allowed business owners to justify added expenses.
Because it took everything that they needed and bundled it together. And one, another big thing that we did this year is we did a ton of competitor analysis. We went through and took all of our top 100 competitors and did a full competitor analysis on it. So know your competition, do your homework, research them out.
Find out what their strengths, their weaknesses are, what avatars they’re targeting, what their reviews say. I now know when I’m talking to a client or a lead prospect, what their pain points are using companies like mine. So I can now say, I understand you had a problem. This is what we’re going to do to rectify it and make sure that we don’t give you the same problem.
Don’t bash your competition. Don’t don’t bash them. Don’t tell them how wrong the business owner was for going with them. I am a big believer of winning on your merits, but I’m also a big believer of you need to know who you’re going up against. So know your competition, do your homework and research them out.
Is probably one of the largest things I talk about is that the most important? Probably not, but it is super important. Getting specific niching down with who you’re going to work with. Are you going to be the marketing rockstar to rockstars? Are you going to be okay? The number one e-com ad business media, BI solution out there.
Are you going to be the Hollywood of websites for plastic surgeons, niche down who you want to work with? Sometimes you may even need to subniche out medical industry. That’s a large list. Maybe you need to solve those down, figure out what in the medical industry you want to work with. Find out who you want to work with, who you love to work with, be happy, find your sweet spot, find people like-minded of you.
So be specific on top of that, maybe look at cutting down what you offer. So this might be counterintuitive to making money, but sometimes you need to cut down services. So back in the day forward, Only produced the model T for years, that is all they built. They didn’t do anything else, but they did it amazingly well.
It made them one of the largest car companies in the world. Now, the son, Henry Ford, Jr. When he came on, he started adding other lines and other products on it, allowed them to grow into the mammoth they are today. So start with one or two services. Or cut services down that aren’t profitable for you that you don’t enjoy doing get really good at what’s profitable and what you enjoy doing.
And then add more on. If that’s JV partnering with people that do it, say you’re a web designer and you partner with an SEO firm, or is that hiring a freelancer? Is that. Using a fulfillment company, but be really, really good at what you offer. You can’t offer it all because you can’t be good at it all. So it’d be really good at what you offer.
All right. And carve out your own niche.
This seems like a no brainer, but know your customers. You know how many times I’ve talked to agency owners and they don’t know who their customers are. When I talk to them about an avatar, they don’t have one. They’ve never created one. So create a customer, avatar, a customer profile. Who are you trying to sell to?
What do they want? What goals can you help them reach? What do you want them to think and feel? Who are they? Give them a name? Give them an age. Are they married? Are they single male, female, 2025. Build out your perfect customer in your head, put it on paper and then find other find leads like your perfect customer, knowing that profile and knowing that customer avatar will really allow you to speak to them.
When you talk to them, they’ll, they’ll feel they’ll walk away feeling. Like you are talking directly to them because you know, everything there is to know about them. Okay. Buyer’s first again, this seems like a no-brainer, but makes a customer number one, there is an old additive in the world that says the customer is always right.
And I heartedly disagree with that. The customer is not always right. However, The customer is number one, they are why we’re in business. If it wasn’t for that customer, we would not be here. So be helpful, answer the questions that they have in a timely manner. Build up that trust while you’re in the prospecting and lead phase.
Set, clear expectations. They need to know who you are before they move forward. And you need to know who they are before you move forward. It’s a dance. It’s a date. Get to know him. You’re not going to ask the date, the first dance to marry you. You’re going to want to get to know him. So you do that. Get to know him, go that extra mile to make that selling experience.
Amazing. Be that super romantic partner that goes the extra mile to make sure that the other partner is happy and ready, and comfortable and wanting to move forward. And remember, ultimately what you’re selling is you. So you need to build that strong connection with your customer. You have to build that rapport with them.
If you don’t have a good rapport with them, they’re not going to buy from you. People don’t buy products, people buy people. They, you know, the H to H human human. I don’t like B2B business to business or B to C consumer to consumer business to consumer because it puts a very surgical sterilization into it.
Just two businesses selling to two businesses. No, it’s not. You are selling yourself. And I know we’ve all run into the aspect of like we’ve gone in and we’ve done a pitch. And then we hear, well, you know, uh, a friend of a friend of a friend is doing this, but that friend of a friend of a friend. They’re not buying what that friend of a friend of a friend can actually do.
No they’re buying because of the relationship that they have with them. So you need a strong connection with them as well. So taking the time to listen to who they are, what their pain points are, understanding them is super important. So be personable and understand the pain points before you try to sell them again.
This is a date. You’re courting them. You’re you’re getting to know who they are. Do they like pizza or no? Do they like rock music or country music? So get to know your, get to know your prospects. Don’t just jump in there. Boom. Give me your credit card. All right. So that leads us into our next phase. What can we do to add value?
Both during the pandemic and after, so impress for success. When you sit down and you think about it, think about your clients. Experience, walk through it, have a family member go through it, have a super shopper. Do it, find out what the experience is. Make sure that you’re getting and in perceiving and giving that value to them and what that value is.
So what kind of value are they getting from you and your business? What can you do to give them more value? Doesn’t necessarily have to cost more. It doesn’t have to eat into your profit or if it does it, doesn’t have to eat it by much, but what can you do to give them more value? All right, now we’ve all heard this one quality over quantity.
So after you’ve gone through the process of bringing the prospect on getting to know them, you, you should already know what they feel. Quality is. Quality leads. Quality emails, quality, whatever. So deliver your service or product on time or early, if possible, give them what they want and do it better than anybody else can ever do.
Bringing them better value and always have them come back for more. I’m a big fan. I don’t care about the first dollar. I care about their last dollar. Now this isn’t meaning that my clients are only dollars to me, but when I say I only care about the last dollar, I would rather sell a client a $500 service over a 10 year period, which is $60,000 give or take versus a one-time sale of $5,000.
The lifetime value is what I care about. And so I want to continuously give them better value. So their lifetime value continues to grow with me. We also talk about this with our, with our clients and we tell our clients, you guys have to make sure the lifetime value of your client is big. It’s affordable, it’s profitable.
The ROI is there. Well, the same applies to us. So quality over quantity. Now there’s a say there’s only three ways that you can get something. You can get something fast, you can get something good and you can get something cheap, but you can only choose two of those three. So no one likes to wait. And you know, it’s been proven, especially in the last 18 months that businesses that can deliver their goods and services faster than anybody else tend to be choosing more than businesses that are slower at delivering things.
And if you think about it, it’s true. We ourselves do it. When we go to a website, we want it to load quickly. We want it to load in less than a, uh, you know, two and a half seconds or less. We want it to be quality when we open it up. So we have to be quick and we have to be good. We don’t want to sacrifice the quality just to produce something faster, but we do want to produce it faster.
A website taking six months to build just isn’t feasible anymore. It’s not profitable anymore, but that doesn’t mean that it should take a day to build it. So really take the time to build something quickly, yet super, super quality. Your processes that you have in place will allow you to do this a lot easier too.
The more processes and SLPs you have in place, the better your quality is going to be because it’s going to be delivered the same way over and over and over again, which means you can do it faster. And it’s still high quality. Going back to Ford, Henry Ford developed the first lines. He figured out a way that.
By instead of having people move the cars around and keep continue going to different stations, if he puts people in a station and the car moves and, uh, you know, another car comes up behind him that the person putting on the lug nuts are going to be really, really good and be really fast about putting on those lug nuts, the person installing the seats, and that’s all they install are going to be really good at it.
So have a product line that’s productized has processes going on. Has your SP SOP is going on standing operating procedures put in place. So everything is done the same way over and over again. Train your staff to produce it the same way over and over again. That way you can do it fast yet it can still be high quality.
Now, another thing is. And it seems so, duh, but you got to give them value. So when you step back and look at things like how can you add the value to your product and service? Don’t do the norm. You want to go that extra mile, give something extra, do something extra, whatever it is, find out what’s going to entice your customers and make them feel.
They’re getting more than what they’re paying for. So, as an example, as of the end of 2019, we started doing gift boxes for our clients. So as clients came on board, we’d send them gift boxes depending on what their monthly rev, uh, recurring revenue was, would be the. It’s a determining factor on what gift box they got, but they got gift boxes.
And because of that, our clients really started feeling like they were valued. And if we found out that they loved coffee, then we hooked up with a company out of New York that sends coffee pods to their office. If we found out that they. We’re big swag fans like me and anybody that knows me can tell you how much I like to sweat.
We would send them swag. They’re audio book, fanatics, like my wife, we send them audio books. You know, I want to use two examples. So of a company that was trying to court me to, to get us to come over and you start using them, um, or adding them into our sales process was yellow. I received this amazing box from Yelp.
It had all kinds of swag had water bottles, stickers, things for my kids, all kinds of stuff in there. I wasn’t a customer of them. I wasn’t a client of them, but they gave me something that I found very valuable and they made me feel loved. So I looked at it and I said, well, even if I’m paying $200 a month, I am, I’m still valued by these guys.
Now I know. Psychologically and being a sales expert. I know that they really don’t care, but I felt like they did. Right. Another example is WP engine. I got some, I got some swag from WP engine. It just randomly showed up in my mailbox one day, Oh, water model and some shirts and some other stuff.
Flywheel’s another one flywheel sends me swag all the time. I feel very, I feel like I’m valued by them and it’s something that doesn’t cost them a much, but it’s something that they find super that I find super valuable is it have a dollar amount to it now, but I feel loved, I feel cared for. And so it makes me want to use them even more.
So find out whatever that is for your customers. And make them feel like they’re getting more than what they’re paying for. You know, there’s a, there’s an additive kiss. Keep it simple. And honestly, I want to drop off the S and I want to change it to keep it simple and easy. And I think it should be, keep it simple, stupid, but keep it simple and easy.
There’s a reason fast food is super popular. It’s quick, it’s easy. It’s convenient. People love convenience. So make sure that whatever it is, you’re offering them is super easy for them to get access to and use if it’s a website. And that’s why a lot of us moved from Divi to BeaverBuilder because it’s easier for our end users, our end clients to use on the backend.
So most times it’s easier on the front end, too. So a lot of us use different tool sets and reporting software because it’s easier for us to report what we want to look at it the same way when it comes to our clients. So we want to make sure that the product and service is easy for them to get in use as well.
It’s super easy for us to get lost in our own world and lost in our own head and get very complicated with how we do things for our clients. But we have to understand. And we have to remember that our clients don’t think like we do, they’re not marketers. They’re not web designers. They’re Joe Schmoe, the roofing guy, the plumbing guy, the electrician, the lawyer.
They don’t look at their marketing and website the same way we do. So telling them that their website is terrible. Isn’t gonna just make it. Easy for them to understand you have to under, you have to find that super easy way to explain it. And then you have to find that super easy way for them to be able to use it
last. But definitely not least is honestly, customer service is key. It really is, no matter what way you look at it, customer service is going to make it or break it for your business. And if you don’t have good customer service, it doesn’t matter how good your S your services are. People are going to leave.
If they don’t feel loved and cared for, or listened to much less, they’re going to leave. Perfect example of that. I had a cable company. Dish network and I love their service, but every time I had to ask, every time I had to call in for something, it was so hard to get answers to my questions. I ended up leaving and no matter how much I love the cable, it didn’t matter how much I love this service.
If I couldn’t get them to, to answer me and respect me, then I couldn’t respect that. And our clients were the same way. So you have to make sure that your customer service is. At the top of its game. This is by far the most important team that you have because these guys are the ones that are going to keep your clients or lose your clients.
If you have a marketing team that works for you, freelancers are employees and they screw up the client. Most likely we’ll be okay. You have a customer service rep that blows up at a client because they ask a question you’re losing that client. So make sure your customer service is where it needs to be at.
It needs to be way better than what you think always improve on it. I mean, I tell you GoWP. I love their customer service. If I have a question. Emily over there is just super quick to answer my questions and there’s several other companies out there that are just like it. And because, and because of that, I value their services even more.
I value what they can provide and what they do even more because not only do they do top tier services, their customer service is spectacular. So make sure your customer service is spectacular. Amazing customer service can save your business. It can also break your business. So again, I want to thank you guys for, for coming to this event and this, this talk.
And I know a lot of what we talked about, you know, really seems like dumb moments. Um, but hopefully putting it together this way. These are all reasons. We went back to basic at the beginning of the year, and these are all the biggest reasons why we continue to grow our business month over month. And while we’re still growing.
So take these, implement them into your business and work with them. Take them, tweak them, make them your own, figure out how best it can work for you and your business and everything else. And then go rock on. I know you guys got this with everything that’s been going on in 2020. Don’t let that affect how you do your business and how you’re going to continue moving forward with your business.
I want to thank you guys again for coming in. I’m very much appreciate you guys spending your 30 minutes with me. It’s amazing. I appreciate it. Thanks so much. I look forward to hearing from you, seeing you guys networking with you guys, and I look forward to it. Thanks so much. Have a wonderful day guys.
