How to Get and Keep Good Clients


Book Description




How Clients Buy


Book Description

The real-world guide to selling your services and bringing in business How Clients Buy is the much-needed guide to selling your services. If you're one of the millions of people whose skills are the 'product,' you know that you cannot be successful unless you bring in clients. The problem is, you're trained to do your job—not sell it. No matter how great you may be at your actual role, you likely feel a bit lost, hesitant, or 'behind' when it comes to courting clients, an unfamiliar territory where you're never quite sure of the line between under- and over-selling. This book comes to the rescue with real, practical advice for selling what you do. You'll have to unlearn everything you know about sales, but then you'll learn new skills that will help you make connections, develop rapport, create interest, earn trust, and turn prospects into clients. Business development is critical to your personal success, and your skills in this area will dictate the course of your career. This invaluable guide gives you a set of real-world best practices that can help you become the rainmaker you want to be. Get the word out and make productive connections Drop the fear of self-promotion and advertise your accomplishments Earn potential clients' trust to build a lasting relationship Scrap the sales pitch in favor of honesty, positivity, and value Working in the consulting and professional services fields comes with difficulties not encountered by those who sell tangible products. Services are often under-valued, and become among the first things to go when budgets get tight. It is now harder than ever to sell professional services, so your game must be on-point if you hope to out-compete the field. How Clients Buy shows you how to level up and start winning the client list of your dreams.




The Irresistible Consultant's Guide to Winning Clients


Book Description

This deeply insightful guide to understanding what clients really want is “an indispensable resource for consultants” (Keith Ferrazzi, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Never Eat Alone). Independent consulting is a potentially lucrative enterprise—but the reality seldom matches the dream. Most solo consultants and boutique consulting firms are perpetually within six months of bankruptcy due to the sputtering unreliability of their new business engines. The problem, according to international consulting expert David A. Fields, is twofold: 1) lack of a consistent, proven plan, and 2) fundamental misunderstanding about what clients want in a consultant. Fields, who has helped hundreds of consultants and boutique firms worldwide build profitable, sustainable practices, replaces the typical consultant’s mindset of emphasizing expertise and differentiated processes with a focus on building relationships, engendering trust, and solving clients’ existing problems. In The Irresistible Consultant’s Guide to Winning Clients, Fields synthesizes his decades of experience into a step-by-step approach to winning more projects from more clients at higher fees. From nuts-and-bolts business advice and tactics to a deeply insightful breakdown of the human side of a very human profession, Fields, named one of Advertising Age magazine’s “Marketing Top 100,” delivers a comprehensive guidebook that is at once highly approachable and satisfyingly detailed. “If I could have just one book on client strategy, this book would be it.” —Marshall Goldsmith, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Triggers




Clients for Life


Book Description

Finally, the book that all professionals frustrated with fleeting client loyalty and relentless price pressure have waited for—the first in-depth, guide to developing lasting client relationships. Millions of people in this country earn their livings by serving clients, and their numbers are growing every day. Unfortunately, far too few develop the skills and strategies needed to rise to the top in a world where clients have almost unlimited access to information and expertise. Clients for Life sets forth a comprehensive framework for how professionals in all fields can develop breakthrough relationships with their clients and enjoy enduring client loyalty. Supported by more than 100 case studies and wisdom gleaned from interviews with dozens of leading CEOs and prominent business advisors, Clients for Life identifies what clients really want and lays out the core qualities that distinguish the client advisor—an irreplaceable resource—from the expert for hire, a tradable commodity. Readers will learn, for example, to develop selfless independence, which tempers complete emotional, intellectual, and financial independence with a powerful commitment to client needs; to become deep generalists and overcome the narrow perspective caused by specialization; to systematically build lifelong trust; and to cultivate the power of synthesis—big-picture thinking—that is so highly valued by clients. Portraits of history's most famously successful advisors, including Machiavelli, Sir Thomas More, and J. P. Morgan, underscore these timeless qualities that modern professionals need to develop to excel in today's competitive environment.




Clone Your Best Clients


Book Description

What if you could clone your best clients and work with them over and over again?Imagine how happy, fulfilled, and profitable you'd be if you could work with more of these ideal clients who appreciate and respect your work and don't object to your prices. Sounds magical, doesn't it? Clone Your Best Clients can help you identify, find, and attract your ideal clients.This book introduces readers to the "Clone Your Best Clients System," a process creative entrepreneurs and wedding business owners use to understand their very best clients and attract more clients just like them. You'll learn how to identify the clients you love to work with and create a marketing plan unique to your business that consistently attracts more of your ideal clients. If you want to work with more of your ideal clients and take the guesswork out of your marketing, this book is for you.




Book Yourself Solid Illustrated


Book Description

A visual way to easily access the strategies and tactics in Book Yourself Solid Learning new concepts is easier when you can see the solution. Book Yourself Solid Illustrated, a remarkable, one-of-a-kind work of art, transforms the Book Yourself Solid system into a more compelling and easy-to-consume playbook for any business owner. You won't find business school graphs or mind maps. Instead, you'll find compelling, visual stories that reinvent old and tired business concepts, making Book Yourself Solid Illustrated a fun and playful book that you will revisit year after year as you get more clients than you can handle. There isn't a business book on the market that can show you how to apply the strategies, techniques, and skills necessary to generate new leads, add more clients, and increase profits through visuals. Previously you could only read or listen to advice, now you can see it and get it faster. This illustrated version is organized into four modules: your foundation, building trust and credibility, simple selling and perfect pricing, and the Book Yourself Solid 6 core self-promotion strategies. Reengineering the book with visual strategist, Jocelyn Wallace, has given author Michael Port new ways of explaining and expanding his gold-standard material. Author Michael Port has been called a "marketing guru" by the Wall Street Journal and "an uncommonly honest author" by The Boston Globe, and wrote Book Yourself Solid (in it's 2nd edition), Beyond Booked Solid,The Contrarian Effect which was selected as a 2008 top ten business book by Amazon.com and the 2008 #1 sales book of the year by 1-800-CEO-READ, and The New York Times Bestseller, The Think Big Manifesto. Author is one of the most popular business coaches in the world and headlines events all over the world. Master the techniques in Book Yourself Solid Illustrated, and take your service business to the next level today. For the first time ever you can have the Book Yourself Solid Mobile app. Install it on any device and the Book Yourself Solid System comes to life. Do all of 49 exercises from the new book on any device, including your desktop computer. This thing rocks.




Clued In


Book Description

Good, bad, or indifferent, every customer has an experience with your company and the products or services you provide. But few businesses really manage that customer experience, so they lose the chance to transform customers into lifetime customers. In this book, Lou Carbone shows exactly how to engineer world-class customer experiences, one clue at a time. Carbone draws on the latest neuroscientific research to show how customers transform physical and emotional sensations into powerful perceptions of your business... perceptions that crystallize into attitudes that dictate everything from satisfaction to loyalty. And he explains how to assess and audit existing customer experiences, design and implement new ones... and "steward" them over time, to ensure that they remain outstanding, no matter how your customers change.




Never Say Sell


Book Description

Learn the secrets of how recurring revenue is driven at expert firms like BCG, KPMG, EY, and more Never Say Sell: How the World's Best Consulting and Professional Services Firms Expand Client Relationships explains how to scale individual engagements into long-term business relationships. Cowritten by Tom McMakin, the coauthor of How Clients Buy and expert in account development, and colleague Jacob Parks, this book provides insights from key rainmakers at firms like Accenture, IBM, and more into how they drive growth from existing relationships. Never Say Sell is a business development guide for professional service providers like consultants, accountants, and lawyers, whether they are sole proprietors or members of account teams tasked with expanding key accounts. Doing good work with existing clients is not enough to have them come back to you again and again. You must do more. This book explores the techniques and methods that leading professional service providers use to add value, cross sell, and drive recurring revenue from existing engagements. Never Say Sell will help you turn one-and-done clients into some of your most exciting and lucrative relationships. It is a must-have for any professional who benefits from repeat business.




Make Or Break Conversations


Book Description

The most powerful way to build trust is through more powerful conversations. Clients don't just want conversations about facts, numbers, and market knowledge; they want to know that you listen and that you care. Make Or Break Conversations teaches guiding principles, but not by boring how-tos, robotic responses, or scripts of conversations. You will learn how to have conversations that matter in your own way. Based on understanding the science, psychology, and human behavior behind quality conversations, you will discover that the conversations we have, the relationships we build, the actions we take, and the results we get are simply better together. When you have the skills to masterfully lead a make-or-break conversation, you gain a powerful competitive advantage over those who just stick to the facts.




Selling 180 - A Different Approach to New Business Development


Book Description

This book challenges your ideas about selling and provides a fresh approach to prospecting, qualifying and closing new business. You'll get practical tips on how to: > Create prospecting emails that can get a 50% response rate > Get a reply from an unresponsive prospect in 30 minutes or less > Create a more compelling value proposition (without buzzwords) to attract ideal clients > Use five key questions for prospects that ensure you waste less time > Shift the traditional buyer-selling dynamic—where YOU are in control > Build a team culture that can recruit, retain and develop top talent "Since being introduced to Tom's principles, my sales are up 35% and my funnel of qualified prospects has more than doubled. I now have a focused process to prospect, qualify and earn longtime clients. Tom's approach is more conversational, more open and honest, and definitely more effective. The resulting sales are larger, margins are higher, and the sales cycle is shorter." — Scott Whitney, Sales Representative "This approach gave my team a different way to think about sales, a new language that is much more human, and a systematic process that allows us to be in control with prospects and clients." — Roseanne Luth, CEO