Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Made in the UK for HR consultants worldwide. You're listening to the HR Marketing Guys podcast.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Hello, James here, and welcome to this week's podcast. In this week's main event, I'm going to be talking to you about quiet patches. Whether you've had a quiet patch or you're going through one right now, they can be really unsettling, especially when your outgoings are going to be more than what you've got coming in. And that's why I'm going to talk to you about what you can do to prevent them from happening in the first place, as well as what you can do to get some new clients fast. And in this week's thought of the week, I'm going to talk to you about how terrible people are at delegating and why I think it's the ultimate business flex. So let's jump straight in.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: This week's main event.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: If you've had a quiet patch in the past, or are going through one right now, then you need to listen to this. A couple of consultancy owners have approached me recently saying that they're going through a bit of a quiet patch and that they're worried. They've recently taken on more staff because they've had a couple of big projects running. These projects are now coming to an end. New work hasn't come in, they've got increased overheads and they're worried about cash flow. And this seems to be a pattern that they've got themselves stuck in. I hear this story quite a lot, and for me, this re emphasizes two things. The first is that you should always try and have enough recurring revenue in the business to pay for all of your overheads and make profit. This is key to running a scalable and stress free consultancy. And the second is that you should always be marketing your consultancy or doing some sort of lead generation, even when things are going great and you're super busy because you simply can't rely on word of mouth or referrals to keep you going. That's really risky business. So that's what you should be doing to avoid quiet patches and cash flow issues in the future. But what could you be doing if you're going through a quiet patch right now and need some new clients fast? Well, I think you should try doing a multi touchpoint campaign. A multi touchpoint campaign is a marketing campaign that involves multiple touch points. And for you guys, there are only really four touch points to play around with. The first is direct mail, so that's post. The second are emails. The third are socials like LinkedIn and Facebook. And then the fourth is the good old fashioned telephone. So think actually giving them a call, dropping them a text or WhatsApp. So the whole point of a multi touchpoint campaign is that you go hard and fast within a short time period to maximize results. If I do a multi touchpoint campaign, I typically do it over a week or two. So on Monday, let's say I'll try and make sure that my letter lands. On Wednesday I send a follow up email. On Friday I send a DM on LinkedIn. And on Monday, the following week, I give them a quick call. And while all of this is happening, I'd be posting across socials too. So multi touchpoint campaigns are really, really powerful. And let me explain why. So when people do marketing, they do something that I call one step marketing. That's when you try and get someone's attention and you sell to them straight away. But we need to remember some marketing truths. You need to be in the right place at the right time. People only buy when they're ready to buy. And you need 28 to 62 touch points on average before someone buys from you. So those stats are crazy. So taking this into consideration, your single, solitary email is probably a waste of time if it's never followed up with further communication. That's why if you're looking to gain new clients, you need to think about a multi touchpoint approach. So I'd like to share my personal experience of how a multitouch point campaign has helped me with my own business growth. When I first started my business, good. Three, four years ago now, I created a free book called Firing People doesn't grow your HR consultancy. I then scraped Google for every HR consultant in the UK and got someone to go through all of their data and find your contact details to create my cold list. Once I had my cold list, I then decided to send some emails to you guys offering you a free copy of my book. That worked very well. I got around 30% sign up rate from my cold list, which is fabulous. But then I hit a ceiling with those cold emails. Then using the same list, I started targeting people who hadn't responded to those emails on LinkedIn. This worked well too. Another 20% or so requested their free copy of my book. But then I hit another ceiling. So I started sending letters out to people, and that brought me a few more people on. And then my next step was to call them. And again, that got a really great response. So what I'm trying to demonstrate here is that email alone only got me so far. LinkedIn alone only got me so far, post only got me so far, and telephoning people only got me so far. But combined, I got a much greater result than what I would do if I just did one thing. So, quite simply, when you do a multitouch point campaign, you maximize results. So that's why if you need to get new clients first, a multitouch point campaign is a great way for you to do it because you are really giving it your best shot. So what makes a great multitouch point campaign? Well, first you need a great angle. And what I mean by this is your reason for getting in touch with them. So sending out a campaign and saying hey, do you have any HR issues that you need help with? Is a really wishy washy angle. Instead, you need to find a compelling reason to get in touch with them. So here in the UK, the new Labour government are introducing a whole new wave of employment laws that are very employee centric. This is an awesome reason to get in touch with business owners. It's law related, they need to do it and it's time sensitive, so they need to take action within a certain time frame. The second thing that makes a great campaign is a great call to action. So whatever you're talking about, you need to offer business owners a very clear call to action that's inviting enough for them to take it. Maybe it's simply a confidential call over Zoom, or maybe you're giving away a free resource. So if you want to get new clients first and you want to give a multitouch point campaign a try, you first need to create a really strong angle and call to action. Once you've decided this, you'll then need to write your campaign. So it's really important to keep anything you do really short and sweet. Make it punchy, get straight to the point, explain why it's important and create urgency for them to get in contact with you. Once you've created your campaign materials, you'll then need to create your target list. So what your list will look like will completely depend on who you're targeting. You could decide to find 50 local businesses that you want to work with, or if you're targeting a particular industry, then you may want to target these people too. I think my advice on this is to keep your list a manageable size because it's important to do all of the steps in the multi touchpoint campaign. If they haven't taken action and if you're targeting 50 clients, then it's not a huge job for you to go and find their data and create a nice tidy spreadsheet with their email, postal address etcetera. So once you have your list, you can then send the letter to them. You can either print them off and post them yourself or use an online service like doc mail, which I've used loads before and love. If you're using a service like doc mail, top tip is to send a letter to yourself too so you know when they land. Once the letter lands, it's important to follow that up with an email within one or two days. Don't leave it any longer because people will forget. And if you're targeting a list of 50 then these emails can easily be sent from your own email and you don't need to be worrying about setting up mailchimp or providing opt outs, etcetera. Again, really nice and easy. Once you've done this, you'll then need to send them a DM. So make sure you personalize the message somehow so it doesn't look like a copy and paste job. And then if you're feeling really brave, you could follow this up with a quick courtesy call. So telephone follow up actually has really high conversion rates, probably the highest. So I would encourage you to give it a try as it's a great way to build relationships. You can think of it in that way rather than selling, you are simply just getting in touch as a courtesy call and trying to build those relationships. And of course, if the business owner takes action at any point in the campaign, you stop the campaign for them, wherever they may be. If they don't take action, then you carry the campaign on until it ends and that's it. Really guys, I love multi touchpoint campaigns. I do them all the time, get great results from them. So if you're going through a bit of a quiet patch right now, or you simply want to get new clients, then why not give a multi touchpoint campaign a try and let me know how you get on.
So in the HR marketing box, I've created a few different multi touchpoint campaigns that you could use and easily adapt to any angle or call to action of your choice. The HR marketing box is an online library full of ideas and ready to use content to help you increase your brand awareness and get new clients. And there are different versions for the UK and US. The content is created by UK and US HR professionals. It's edited by me to make sure that it resonates with business owners. It's designed by talented designers to look awesome and delivered to you via canva making it super easy to personalize. There's loads of great content to choose from, like educational guides, articles, newsletters and social media content, and about every HR subject, with special attention made to position you as a strategic partner and HR expert. It's a huge time saver. It's a thousand times cheaper than hiring your own content writer, and it saves you loads of stress and hassle. You can either copy and paste the content or use it as a starting point for your own amazing content avoiding blank page syndrome. To learn more about the content and campaigns we create, please go to my website, the hrmarketingguy.com and go to the HR marketing box at the top James.
[00:09:27] Speaker A: Thought of the week.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: In today's thought of the week, I want to ask you, how good are you at delegating? Because I've recently realized that people are actually terrible at it and it's really stopping them from fulfilling their full potential. So let me tell you a story about my dating life I know sounds a bit random. I went on a date the other day with a luxury property developer and interior designer I know, very fancy. We met at the gym, started having nice chats and said that we should go for dinner. Super nice guy, but sadly not for me, in a romantic way. So we're just going to be friends and that's the end of the story. Only joking. There is a point to this. So while I was at dinner, I was asking him about his work and he just sounded really broken. When I say luxury interior designer, you should see some of the houses he's done, like architectural digest, stunning, obviously, incredibly talented, wonderfully creative, and he is doing really well for himself. But he said he was close to a mental breakdown and you could really actually see it in him. I obviously went into full consulting mode with him and was trying to figure out why. And it turned out that he was just doing absolutely everything in his business. He was doing his bookkeeping, vat returns with his job. There's loads of kind of sample ordering returns. He was doing all of that. On top of that, he's organizing all of the developments he's doing, which, as you can imagine, is a complete logistical nightmare. And I was kind of astounded at the amount of work he was doing. And I said to him in amazement, like, why haven't you hired a virtual assistant? And he just kind of looked at me, gone out. He knew what one was and understood the concept, but for whatever reason was just so reluctant to even think about it or to delegate anything away from his own workload almost as if it was a strength of his. And for me, I just felt like it was a huge weakness. He was doing all of these amazing things, creating all of these amazing spaces, yet he was kind of like, killing himself with the administrative burden of running his business. He was getting so bogged down in the work that he really shouldn't be doing. And in my head I was thinking, why? Like, does he actually know how to delegate? Is it a control thing? Is he nervous about trusting someone? Does he know how to hire a virtual assistant? Does he know what he's looking for? Is he able to objectively look at his workload and see what could be delegated out and what couldn't? I mean, there were so many questions flying about in my head, and it wasn't like he couldn't actually afford one or couldn't afford a team. He was earning a stack. But it was dinner. I was trying to be all cool and didn't want to berate him too much, so I empathized with his situation, said to him that I completely understand, like, it's really tough running a business, but that I think he could really do with getting some support, which he agreed. I then said he should keep a note of all of the jobs he does each day, and then at the end of the week, he should review the list and put the jobs into two categories. So stuff that he absolutely needs to do, like the creative side of the business, and then stuff that could easily be delegated to someone else, like his bookkeeping and the ordering of samples and all of that stuff. We're both business owners, and it was really nice to have those sort of conversations anyway because it kind of felt like therapy for both of us, and we both kind of get what's going on. Anyway, I saw him in the gym the other day and asked him if he had made any progress, and he laughed and said no. And I kind of rolled my eyes, skipped away thinking he was a muppet. I get it, though. I do know that lots of people do struggle to delegate. I think it is seen as some sort of weakness, but for me, it is 100% an absolute flex. There is no way on this planet that you can do everything in your business on top of your own busy personal lives. I know consultants that are running hugely successful businesses on top of looking after their children, looking after their husbands, and then having to look after their old parents, too. Honestly, I don't know how they do it. I really think they're super human. I can just about keep myself above water on a daily basis. So hats off to anyone that is doing all of that and growing a thriving business. You guys deserve a medal. So let's go back to my original question. How good are you at delegating in your personal and business life? Are you doing tasks that someone else could easily be doing for you? Are you doing tasks that are sucking up all of your time and energy? And are you doing tasks that are stopping you from doing what you do best? And the stuff that you really should be focusing on, like being the face of the business, driving it forward, getting new clients, making more money, and actually giving yourself the time and energy to enjoy your success.
You can probably tell that I'm really passionate about this. My mission statement that underpins everything I do is helping you to get new clients and create a life that you love. It's the end part for me that's most important. And when I sit there listening to how hard you guys are working, I want to do everything I can to make things easier for you. So here's my challenge to you. Make a list of all of the things you do every single day at the end of the week or month. I want you to review the list. Look at the stuff that you absolutely need to do and look at the stuff that can easily be delegated to someone else. If you can afford to hire a VA or someone else, then do it. If you can't right now, then make this one of the goals that you work towards in the future. And lastly, just make sure that you're putting your time and energy into stuff that will make the biggest impact for you and your business.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: You've been listening to the HR Marketing Guys podcast helping you to get new clients and create a life you love.
