Podcast Episode 1: 3 ways to make more money from existing clients

Transcription below:

Hello, James here. And a big welcome to my first ever podcast episode.

In today's main event, I'm going to talk you through three ways to get existing clients to give you more money. Who doesn't want that?

This week's client story, we're going to hear from Helen and David Price Evans about winning breathe social Media presence award and how they use social media to grow their consultancy.

And then we're going to wrap the episode up talking about why I keep a happy diary and why I think you should keep one too.

So let's jump straight in.

This week's main event 

Wouldn't it be great if your existing clients gave you lots more money every single month?

Well, in today's main event, I've got some awesome ideas to help you sell more to existing clients without feeling like you're being a big old sales pest.

Let's get started with a bit of strategy that you need to know first.

So there are three ways to increase your consultancy's revenue.

The first is to get new clients.

The second is to get existing clients to spend more with you.

And the third is to get existing clients to spend more with you more often.

Now, getting new clients is actually the hardest and most costly way for you to make more money. The effort and energy you put into getting new clients is a lot and really expensive.

So the easiest way to make more money is by getting existing clients to spend more with you and to spend more with you more often.

And luckily for you, it's super easy for you to do this without being all salesy.

The second thing I'd like to address is your mindset towards selling more to existing clients.

Many consultants I speak to feel really uncomfortable about having any sort of up or cross sell conversation with their clients.

Why? Well, I think it's because you've forgotten the value that you provided. Value as a concept, I think, is a really big problem for you guys. Many of you have had to fight to get people to see your value your entire career. And when you were employed, HR wasn't taken seriously and you really had to fight for your seat at the table, and you probably got sick of this.

And it's maybe one of the reasons as to why you started your consultancy in the first place. And then you face the same challenges while trying to grow your consultancy. But the fight has almost intensified because the growth of your business and your income is now reliant on it.

And because of all of this, I think you've forgotten the value that you do provide. And this is why you find any sort of conversation like this really difficult.

If you do feel like this, I'd like to lovingly remind you about the amazing value that you offer to business owners, their businesses and their employees.

You guys are awesome. You're revolutionizing the world of work, and business owners need you.

The second bit of mindset I want to cover is unconscious bias.

So when it comes to selling more to existing clients, a lot of HR consultants I speak to say, oh, they won't buy this, or they won't need this, or they'll think this is too expensive.

You're making decisions on behalf of the business owner without even talking to them about it, which is crazy.

Look, I get it. You're protecting yourself from any sort of rejection, which is natural, and I'm guilty of doing this too. But you must recognize when you're doing this and try to push past it, because you're doing yourself a huge disservice. And the final bit of mindset that I want to talk to you about, which will help you with everything we've discussed already.

Remembering that having these sort of conversations with business owners is your job. You're the HR expert. You're there to help business owners achieve their goals. And it's your job to have conversations with your clients to find out what their goals are as to determine what support they need from you in order to achieve them.

Business owners don't know what you know. They don't understand HR, let alone what they need from HR. And don't let them try and tell you otherwise. It's your job to tell them what they need. And in order to do that, you just need to ask.

So instead of thinking you're a pesky salesperson, remind yourself that you're the HR expert they've chosen to work with. So it's your job to help them in other ways in the future, too.

So that's my little inspirational kick up the bum. Done with. Hope you enjoyed it.

Now it's time to talk about my awesome ideas to help you get existing clients to spend more with you more often.

So here's my first idea.

It's to help you spot opportunities to work with clients in new and wonderful ways. And it's called the profit matrix.

The profit matrix is a management tool to help you see at a glance what services your clients have bought and what opportunities there are to upsell to them. It's a very, very powerful tool, and it's basically a big table. And you can do this in excel or on a whiteboard or whatever. On one axis are all of your clients, on another axis are all of the services you provided. You then highlight which clients are buying which services, and it's just a really lovely and beautiful way for you to see what clients are and aren't buying from you at a really easy glance.

So be sure to make yourself a little profit matrix after this episode.

The second awesome idea I have is that there should be someone in your consultancy responsible for doing the account management role. Now I'm saying that with little bunny fingers. Okay, so in the marketing agency world when it comes to looking after clients, there would be an account manager and a project manager. I think this is the same in most industries, to be honest.

The account manager is the person that looks after the account, so they're in charge of retention, upselling and profitability.

The project manager is the person that does the actual work, and then the account manager and project manager work closely together to ensure work is done on time, within margin, and that the client is happy.

You guys are really good on the project management side of things, but I think there needs to be someone that has the time in order to step back and look at the bigger picture. So for startups, independent consultants, and smaller consultancies, you as the business leader will probably be the best person to take on this role.

But for larger consultancies, you may decide to get one of your staff to do this. As an account manager, it's your job to look at each account to make sure that they're happy, to contact the business owner on a regular basis, to discuss what their goals are, and to suggest other ways to help.

So what's a great way for the account manager person to chat with business owners on a regular basis?

Well, now we've come to my third and final awesome idea, and that's by having regular strategic reviews with clients. At the recurring revenue revolution event I held in June, I asked the room who's having these sort of check ins with their clients on a regular basis, and about 10% of the room raised their hands.

This is so bad, guys. Everyone's hand should have raised because they're such a simple way to offer great service to your clients and to make lots more money. You can call these meetings whatever you want, but they should be wrapped up as part of the service you provide.

That's really important and should be completed on at least a quarterly basis. The agenda of this meeting is simple and is arranged by three questions.

What's going well what's not going so well and what opportunities or problems are there that we could help with. You'll be amazed at the great conversations you'll have with your clients by asking these three simple questions.

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This week's client story

I'm going to spotlight Helen and David Price Evans. They own and run starfish people and were the proud recipients of Breathe's social media presence award at this year's partner summit. I asked Helen how she felt about being nominated last year and winning the award this year and she said: 

Helen: You know, disappointed to have missed out last year, but I think we've, we've kind of honed what we're offering over the last twelve months or so and so to win the award was a great recognition of that. That was just the icing on the cake. Like, yeah, we've worked super hard. When I say we, that's the royal we. We've worked super hard on the social media side and I know we haven't. I know we get that feedback. So that for me, which is, yay, nine years done it. Yeah, it was, it was such an achievement. I loved it.

James: And David, you had a glowing review on stage. It was so hard. Everyone in the room went, oh, like it was really. They were like, I want a husband like David.

Helen: What made me laugh was the theme, then carried on. I can't remember who it was. He got their award and went, and this is my award. And my ex husband had nothing to do with it. So funny.

James: So for context, Helen is the HR consultant and David is her husband. For years, David was telling Helen that they needed to do more with their social media to grow their consultancy. But Helen always struggled to find the time, as many of you do. And a couple of years ago, their daughter Bethany reached out to me to have a chat about the HR marketing box and they've been using our white label marketing content ever since. I asked Helen how she felt about social media before and after they became a member of the HR marketing box and she said, yeah.

Helen: So I guess what interesting, if I go back to the journey, like nine years ago when I started starfish people, I was lucky because I had a few different contracts with people and David was always saying, social media, social media. Come on, we've got to get on social media. And sometimes I would be able to take time out, say, okay, David, this content would be good, or, the legislation is changing here, we should get an announcement out about this.

And then I felt David, David just kept pushing and pushing and pushing, like social media, social media. And it's so hard to get the balance between having the time to think about that content, to create that content, you know, to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and go, what's happening in the world of HR now? What will my clients really benefit from? So when it was actually Bethany who originally spoke to you, James, wasn't it?

And I'd received some things through the post from you, and I know Bethany and David were like, look, this, it's like, it's almost like marketing in box, right? You can pick and choose what you need. And I'll be honest, I just stepped back when, okay, well, leave it to you guys. And then people were commenting, because what David is brilliant at ISDev, I don't know, it's bringing the content to life, making the content our own, if that makes sense. So great. Doing videos and branding things and taking a little bit of this and adding in a little bit of that and all. We've got an awareness day that's come up. He's just so good at doing that. So all of those things have almost helped me, if you like, go from some sort of dark art that takes a lot of time to see in the value of having access to different pieces of relevant information that we can tailor and share with people.

James: I love how Helen used to think that marketing was a dark art, but can now see the value in social media. And it's all thanks to David's hard work, who does such a great job at editing the content we provide to make it their own. When speaking to David, I asked him how important he thought social media was to their general brand awareness, and he said definitely.

David: As far as brand awareness is concerned, it's a massive thing to quantify whether we get work from it without physically asking the clients, which is always a challenge. Where did you hear about us? Which is a genuine question, but some people, depending on the type of business that you're attracting, it sounds a bit corny. If you've got a big business, you'll go, oh, where did you hear about it? But I mean, it is a genuine thing when I don't do it, which is not something I do now, but when I have stopped doing social media for whatever reason, we get comments about you, what's going on? Why don't you do it?

So that's a really good indicator, and that comes from our clients and other people. So it just shows you how important it is. Even if you don't necessarily think you're generating business to it, the awareness is massively important.

James: I think David is spot on here. It's very hard to know where your clients are coming from, but it's clear from the feedback that they receive that posting on social media has a huge impact on their brand awareness. And even when they're too busy to work on other aspects of their marketing, clients are still coming their way from the activity that they're doing on social media.

Helen: And sometimes I've said to them, what's our marketing plan? What's our marketing plan? And then I get taken away with doing something else. Normally the work, and before I know it, someone's commenting, oh, just, yeah, we've signed up for your newsletter and we saw this and, you know, saw the video and I'm like, oh yeah, that's great, but have a look. What's he done now?

James: You know, so huge hats off to David, really, because of his determination and consistency with their socials, they're reaping the rewards and have been able to add a shiny new trophy to their collection. And it's also great to see that Helen is making some lovely videos herself, which is adding a nice little personal touch to their social media posts too. Well done, guys, and keep up the great work.

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James's thought of the week.

I keep what I call a happy diary.

So when it comes to organizing my life, I'm actually quite old school and prefer to use a good old fashioned paper diary. There's something about physically writing my tasks down and crossing them out that I find very cathartic.

I bought two copies of the same diary. One is for stuff that I need to remember and another is for my happy diary. And every night I try and make a note of everything that day that I should be happy and grateful for. Now I actually don't do it every night. Me, being my ADHD self, really struggles with anything routine like this. So I might skip a few days.

And when I'm in the mood, I'll go back and make a note of the stuff that I want to remember. I'm strict on myself to get it done, but not when and how because I don't want it to turn into some sort of toxic positivity thing.

I actually want to enjoy it. So I do this for a few reasons. The first is to balance out my thoughts scale. So I watched a video once and it said that you need to think about your thoughts balancing on a scale. On one side you have your unhappy thoughts and on the other you have your happy thoughts. And when it comes to our personal and business lives, I think it's quite common for us to be harsh to ourselves and we probably have more unhappy thoughts throughout the day and our scales become unbalanced. And I know that this is certainly the case for me.

So at the end of the day, I really enjoy thinking about the stuff that has made me happy. Maybe the connections I've had that day, the stuff that I've achieved when maybe I feel like I haven't done much, and the little moments that I want to remember and be happy and grateful for. And since doing this, I've also noticed that throughout the day when I have a nice little moment, I actually pause to think about them. And I've noticed that this has had a really positive effect on my general mood and outlook too. I also feel like I achieve way more than what I originally thought to, which is nice, especially as a business owner.

The second reason is that around the new year times like December, January, I like to look back on the year to reflect and be grateful for what I've achieved. This also helps me plan for the year ahead. In previous years, when I've tried to do this, I can't actually remember half the stuff I've done when December comes around. So hopefully by keeping a note of the happy stuff on a regular basis within my diary, it'll be a really nice activity to wrap up the end of the year.

My plan is to print out all of the pictures that I've got in my phone and do some sort of scrapbook or something with my diary entries and just be really grateful and happy for the year that I've had. So if you want to recognize your business achievements and top up your happy thoughts, then keeping a happy diary like this, I think is a great way to do it. Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

 You've been listening to the HR Marketing Guys podcast, helping you to get new clients and create a life you love.