Know Who You Are
Hi there! As you may remember from a couple weeks ago, we’re kicking off a series, called our Business Development Playbook. We’re going to stick to this topic for awhile because it’s so important and is the #1 way to control your incoming cash flow. Yet for many, it feels opaque. Our goal is to break down and simplify this concept, making it approachable and actionable.
Although knowing who you are sounds obvious, we find that many people give the concept little to no TLC before going after clients. And we believe that before going external, one should go internal (hello, integrity!). But fear not. If you’ve been following along for some time and doing your virtual homework, you’ve already done the work.
When assembling your playbook, we start with knowing who you are (and being able to articulate it – that’s the trick!) in five pieces:
- Who you are
- What you do
- Who your clients are (and who they are not)
- How you do your work
- Your results
Then, the fun part: your business development goal (what business owner doesn’t love a good goal?)!
1 & 2. Who you are & What you do
Again, I know that this part sounds so obvious. But it’s often hard to put language to who you are and what you do. It’s a true marketing and storytelling skill to design language that simply and directly describes these things to an outsider.
The litmus test to knowing if you have this nailed down is: could a ten year old re-tell who you are and what you do? Really, it’s that simple and that important.
Start with the language you’ve already developed 😉 for your mission and vision. If you’ve done these well, you’ve already completed steps one and two.
3. Who your clients are (and are not)
As we’ve been on-boarding Sarah over the past few weeks and taking her through the Ellevated Outcomes’ playbook, she’s been upping our game with brilliant questions. On day one she asked, “Who are not your clients?” which I thought was genius (and I had to think about)!
Once again, if you’ve been with us for awhile and doing your weekly homework, you have the answer to this question too! Remember the riches in the niches? Refresh yourself on these exercises so that you can get crystal clear and dialed in. There is no such thing as being too specific here, I promise. And this is such a key ingredient to the mix. If we’re going to be asking for business, we need to know precisely what we’re asking for. We need to paint a vivid picture. And speaking of which, a trick, especially for creative people: use Pinterest to illustrate your ideal clients!
4. How you do your work
If you recall, our clients primarily sell services, which means: how they do their work is just as – if not more important – than what they do.
There are two elements to how you do your work: the pragmatic process and the way that you deliver it (read: how they feel when receiving it). Remember the features and benefits of our value proposition? Alongside the nuts and bolts of how your work works, use your company’s values and operating principles to really pull out the how.
For us, for example, we describe the logistics of working with clients for year-long increments and why that is; the types of work we do; and what it does (and doesn’t) feel like to work with us.
5. Your results
From the name of our business, you may have guessed that this is one of our favorite tenets of describing who we are. After all, our entire aim is to ellevate small businesses’ outcomes (get it?). If you’re an interior designer, I’m sure that you have a beautiful portfolio with photos that showcase your “results.” For businesses that are less tangible, it’s a good idea to track both fact-based outcomes and clients’ sentiments of what it’s like to work with you.
We happen to be nuts about tracking these, so just a few of our favorites are:
- Every Achieving New Outcomes client (our main product; it’s what we work from to “level-up” small businesses), who’s followed our plan and work together has exceeded 100% ROI in year 1; in fact, the average ROI is 300%.
- We design and implement plans where bottom line profitability exceeds top line growth.
- Over 40% of new clients are referred to us by current clients.
The last one is our favorite! We want to delight clients so much that they can’t help but tell others about us, so this is the #1 KPI in our business. Sorry, brag over. We just love that stat though!
But back to you… once you bundle all this up and get re-energized about who you are, reflect.
How much do we want to grow? Or, in some cases, how much do we need to grow? If you’re in the habit of doing annual planning (if you’re one of our clients, you sure are ;)) consider the question. “How many new clients do we want to bring on over the next year?”
Now that we sit firmly planted in August and un-firmly planted in a wacky year, I suggest that now is the perfect time to take stock. What do we want to accomplish for the rest of this year? Get that goal SMART and that magic number dialed in. How many clients do you want to bring during the last four months of 2020?
This is scary to say outloud; but I’ll do it(!). For us it’s an ambitious 15. So focus your mind and focus your business. This week, think about your magic new client number. Cement it. And our work together is about to start flowing from there…
