Monthly Archives: May 2020

Hello service provider. I want to talk to you today about something I think is a huge misconception in the service-based business industry. And that is making a really strong impression on your clients so that they’ll be super happy, want to come back for more, give you referrals, sing your praises, et cetera. I think a lot of people believe that they have to go to great lengths to impress their clients. You have to buy them a Ferrari and send them a gift in the mail and that if you don’t do something extraordinary, they’re going to think you’re bland and not really like you. But here’s the truth, and you already know this because you’ve experienced it as somebody who pays for services. Most service-based businesses suck, they’re not trying to suck, they just don’t know how to execute what they said they’re going to do in a way that is a pleasant experience for their clients.

I’m sure you can think of a half dozen instances where you’ve been less than wowed by an experience that you’ve had with a business. Maybe your web designer fell off the face of the earth, maybe like me, you scheduled a deep tissue massage and it felt like they were tickling you the whole time and it was so frustrating. So in this video, what I want to do is give you four simple ways that you can make a really lasting impression on your clients. And these ways are not going to cost you a lot of money. In fact, several of them are free. Actually, three out of four of them are free and the other one is like a dollar, okay, maybe a little more than a dollar, but still.

1: Create leveraged materials for your service.

This all comes down to getting out of freelancing land and creating a signature service for your business. When you have a signature service, you can create materials that you give to every single client and the great thing about this is that it doesn’t cheapen the client’s experience. It makes it a better, more impactful, more luxurious experience. If you, for example, create a worksheet that you give to every single one of your clients, that worksheet is collateral for your service.

That is something you could charge for and actually makes your service more valuable, not less valuable. As an example, when I used to offer Sales page CPR, I would send my clients a really simple PDF I designed in Canva, that outlined the 10 key sections that they needed to have on their sales page. My clients loved this because it gave them a huge aha about how to build the sales page and do it in this very simplistic way. I am sure there’re ways that you can do that for your clients in your industry as well.

2: Do email check-ins with your clients.

Let’s go back to that graphic designer, a web designer who fell off the face of the earth. Chances are this person hasn’t fallen off the face of the earth. They’ve got your project in their docket, they might be working on it. The problem is they’re not updating you on their progress. Clients tend to get grumpy when they don’t know what’s going on and even if you are working on their project, they want to know that you still exist and didn’t forget about them. This can literally be as simple as sending an email saying, “Hey, I just want to let you know I’m working on your project and everything’s going well. Let me know if you have any questions.” That’s it.

3: Send a card in the mail.

You don’t have to buy your clients gifts. You totally can if you want and it’s not going to hurt you. It’s definitely going to help, but you don’t have to, just by sending a heartfelt personalized card in the mail is going to make your clients feel special. Everybody loves getting snail mail, but here’s the caveat on this. Nobody likes getting a form letter that they know is being sent to everybody else as well.

I have been on the receiving end of this when a service provider I was working with sent me a card that was very generic and vague and I could tell that it was just a part of her regular process of sending cards to clients. And if you want to spend a little bit more money, one thing I love to do is to send people books on Amazon. Books don’t cost that much money and you can pay a little bit extra to get them to gift wrapped and then it feels really special for your client.

4: Do a screencast video or a video and send it to your client.

This is a great idea for anybody who has a virtual business and doesn’t get to see their clients face to face. It’s a great opportunity to say hi to them and go over any kind of work that you did and explain it to them. And you can get really creative with this and do whatever you want to do little check-ins.

Is there a store that you love so much that you have a hard time going inside without buying a million things that were not on your list? For me, that store is Target. And if you don’t have a Target near you, I’m so very sorry. It’s the best place on earth.

Honestly, I normally go to Target with a very specific need. Maybe it’s some toothpaste or a pair of socks. I wind up towards the checkout counter with so many things in my cart that I start to question as I get closer and closer to the checkout, do I really need all of these things? Do I really need that box of scented candles? Do I really need all of those markers? Do I really need those pair of shoes that are on sale? And if I decide that I don’t need them, I take them out of my cart and I put them back on the shelf, granted not the right shelf. I try to do it sneakily, so nobody sees me.

I’m wondering if you have the same problem. I’m really hoping I’m not the only one, but what I do know for sure is that this is something I call reshelving syndrome, and it’s something that your clients and customers are doing when they read your sales page. Reshelving syndrome is simply that voice in our head that tries to be the voice of reason and ask us, “Do I really need this thing that I’m compelled to buy right now?” We try to prevent ourselves from making impulse purchases, which is great, but this voice can also prevent us from buying things that are going to give us what we really want.

It’s your job to overcome these hesitations and address reshelving syndrome on your sales page, and I have got four ways that you can do that right now.

1: Step back.

I want you to look at your offer and I want you to ask yourself, really honestly, is this an offer that people really want? Is it solving a problem that my audience really wants to be solved and I know that because they’ve asked me to solve it, or did I look at my passions and talents and create an offer based on something that I really want to do? Now, in the best world, it would be both, right? But in most cases, you’re going to need to create an offer, even if it’s not exactly the way you’d want to do it, it has to be what people want. That’s the most important.

2: Focus on the benefits.

For every feature of your offer, you need to give me the reason why that feature exists. People don’t really care that your ebook is 25 pages or that it’s a six-week course. They trust you that that’s the best way for you to communicate what you need to in order to get them the result that they want, but what they really care about is why is it six weeks? Why is it 20 pages? What is included? What am I going to learn? And how is that going to give me what I want?

Let’s say that you have a personal finance program that helps people to get out of debt, and let’s say that one of your lessons is about how to consolidate your credit card debt. Well, people don’t really care about learning about that, right? But what you need to tell me is why I should care about learning about consolidation. What is that going to give me? How is that going to help me to reach my ultimate goal? And that’s what you need to talk about on your sales page.

3: Give people a reason to decide now.

It’s amazing how humans function. We like to wait and wait and wait to make decisions until we’re given a deadline and then we wait until the very last minute to actually do what we need to do. We fill up the full space allotted in order to make that decision. As long as I know that those shoes are still available at Target, I don’t really feel totally compelled to buy them. If I don’t have a specific event that I need them for or I have a pair of shoes that can serve the purpose that I need, I’m not convinced that I really need to buy them. By giving people a date or time limit to buy your offer, you’re forcing them to make a decision whether that decision is yes or no, and that’s totally fine and up to them.

4: Show people that you understand the problem that they’re facing.

If you’ve been through the same problem that you’re helping your clients and customers to solve, it’s a great idea to share that story with them. I’m always amazed that when I share my stories of struggle and overcoming and triumph, that people always love them and they often mention that they’re their favorite parts of my webinars and sales pages.

Another way that you can build trust with your audience is by getting testimonials from your past clients and putting those on your sales page. Testimonials really are worth their weight in gold, and you do not want to have a sales page without them.

In this blog post, I’m going to show you how I organize my entire business. So we’re going to go over my physical office space, how I organize my digital files and even my to-do list. What I want you to know starting off, is that I am not naturally the world’s most organized person. It does not come easily to me. So I’m hoping that because it’s not something that comes easily to me, I’m actually going to be a better teacher of giving you strategies that you can use for yourself as well.

I know some people said, “It looks pretty tidy.” This mess and this mess drive me crazy. This is what I want to take care of today. All right, it’s looking pretty good, and let’s talk about the must-have elements for me for having an organized home office that is totally functional. So number one, everything must have a place. And I’m not the best at this, I’m a rule breaker remember? I like to change things up, I move my furniture all the time, I reorganize things all the time. I love that, it’s part of my creative passion to change constantly. But if I show you what my shelf looks like or my drawers look like, ideally everything has a spot, so that when I do pick up or I do want to put things back I know exactly where to put them.

Now let’s talk about organizing your files and paperwork. First of all, for any tangible, physical papers and paperwork, I have one place and one place only where I put those documents, and it’s just my inbox, my physical inbox in my office right behind me on a shelf. All the papers go there, and then I sort them when I get around to it, to be honest. But how about those digital files? So let’s dive into my Google Drive so I can show you how I have everything organized in my business.

Now we’re in Google Drive and this is inside of my folder for the entire business. So we divide everything into either operation or offers, or marketing. And in operations, we have things like our metrics, any kind of legal documents we need, budgeting and finance stuff, team operations, et cetera. In our offers folder are all of our products, and when you go into those folders it would be all the documents I need for each one of those products. And then finally we have our general marketing stuff. So this is where we have all of our blog documents, I write all of our video outlines and scripts and ideas here, all of our headshots and photos and graphics go in here. So I can easily find any headshots that I want to pull up because I know exactly where they’re located.

There’s one more thing I wanted to talk to you about, and that is how I manage my to-do list every single day. So we use an app called Asana, it’s totally free, to manage our entire business and do all of our project management. But then I actually have a physical planner here that I write in every day and put my to-do list right in this planner.

I log into an Asana every single day in order to check on my list of to-do’s and make sure that I’m up to date with everything that I need to get done. So what I do is, I’ve created a little save search here of just pulling up the things I need to get done on that day. And as you can see, there’s a lot of video stuff that I’m doing today. And I’ll just look at this and this is the stuff that I will then go and put into my paper planner. And when I plan my week, I have a project called To-Do This Week. So I’ll click on that and then I can actually outline my entire week all at once and make sure that I’m on top of all of my tasks.

Those are the main things that I do in my business to make sure that I am functioning at my highest level of productivity, and that I am completely organized even though the organization does not necessarily come naturally to me.