Notes from a failed pitch - show the map, and the route from here to there

Just a quick write up of notes from a failed pitch.

A consultancy that I periodically work through brought me in on a pitch.

• I had the skills to lead the project
• they could provide the staff
• it was their lead
• they had the client contact and relationship

So we engaged in a joint pitch.

Re-posting and re-purposing as a content creation strategy

Efficient content marketing requires re-use and re-purposing of content.

Sometimes that means direct re-posting, but it also means - using previous content as a basis for creating new content (re-purposing).

e.g.

• I create a daily instagram video
• I try and summarise it into a ‘motivational quote’ image for instagram and pinterst
• I collate the instagram videos into a YouTube video with additional content
• I transcribe the youtube video
• I turn the transcription into a markdown file which I use to create slides for uploading to slideshare
• I transcribe the youtube video into a blog post and add links to the youtube video, instagrams and slides
• I review the blog post from a ‘management’ or ‘motivational’ perspective for one or two linkedin posts

Some of those steps are re-posting, some are re-purposing.

A quick review of content collation and curation tools for newsletter creation

One thing I’m not particularly good at, is sending out a newsletter.

I thought I’d have a quick look at some curation tools to see if they help (and yes, I know this could be considered procrastination).

Jay Abraham Interview on "I Love Marketing" podcast

http://ilovemarketing.com/jay-abraham-interview-on-marketing-and-copywriting/

•  "The other is, there could be such really quality deserving people that have such a superior product, service, concern, commitment, integrated value proposition, but they do now know how to differentiate. They do not know how to communicate. They do not know how to delineate. They do not know how to demonstrate..." 
•  "most people don’t even think about how do I create the trust that lets the prospect know that I have their best interest at heart"

Notes from speaking to experienced consultants

I was speaking to a far more successful consultant than myself a few weeks ago.

By successful I mean:

• charges more
• more shorter term gigs
• higher paid, higher profile gigs
• higher profile in the industry
• contacted by ‘budget holders’ and ‘management’ as well as ‘practitioners’

Now, he has worked for this and deserves the success.

• put himself ‘out there’ far more and far longer than myself
• built his brand
• experimented more

And there is a lot that I can reverse engineer from looking at his public profile but I thought I’d take the opportunity to ask for tips:

On pricing

• negotiate principle of least regret - price so that:
  • If they accept, I would regret taking at that price for it is too low
  • If they walk away, would I regret because I priced too high
• never drop your price after a quote
• discuss money early in the ‘can you work for us’ ‘can you come speak to us’

I think I do points one and two, so I’ve added point three into my repertoire.

I also asked about how he manages to make his travel schedule so profitable:

• put schedule online

I have now put my schedule online, and I’ve also put my current availability online on my website and on linkedin, in the hope that this leads to a sense of scarcity and as a prospecting filter to stop enquiries for “can you come work with us full time for 6 months on this low level role”.

I had thought about doing this before, but after speaking to him and seeing how much he credited gaining work from it, I added this a few days after our talk.

One thing that became clear when speaking though was that he has a much clearer idea of the benefit and value that he brings to the role. And that allows him to communicate it in a clearer and more succinct way than I do.

So I need to work on that.

Also he provided tips on creating talks and content that can attract more sales:

• talk titles based on ‘what do I think would be a good benefit’
• what 3 things would I want to talk about - simplify ‘what’ not the how - models are the how

I still have work to do on my personal marketing and branding. Hopefully this helps.

I previously asked other consultants and the advice was generally “charge more”. I think the advice above, when followed will help develop the positioning to allow charging more.

Jay Abraham on How to 10X Your Business with Lewis Howes - Massive Amounts of Free Sales And Marketing Training Material

I’ve taken value from Jay Abraham’s work in the past - particularly his book “Getting Everything You Can out of All You’ve Got” - and it is one of the books I’ve just started to re-read and revisit (again).
I was pleased to see that Lewis Howes interviewed Jay Abrahams for his “School of Greatness” Podcase.

• http://lewishowes.com/podcast/jay-abraham/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bi4X4KY1DQ&t=577s

Jay offers some really good advice on referals and repurposing and I’ll need to revisit the video again to crib some of the great sales copy ideas at the start.
And there was a really useful story about his work on Entrepreneur magazine:

• repurposed archives into ‘startup manuals’ with ‘boilerplate’ - how to recruit, how to do X
• you are the solution to someone else’s problem who doesn’t know it

At the end of the video I learned something I was completely unaware of - Jay Abraham has released most of his material for free now:

• An unbelievable amount of material in his 50 Shades of Jay section
  • http://www.abraham.com/50shades/
  • this will take a long time to work through
• Read Archives of his email newsletter
  • http://www.abraham.com/category/50-shades/
• You need to register for this… but you get access to an immense amount of training and recorded talks
  • http://www.abraham.com/radio-opportunity/
  • including the book “Getting Everything out of All You’ve Got” - which I have a paperback and CD version, and was just about to work through again.
  • and the book “The Sticking Point Solution”
  • … it just goes on

I suspect I’ll be studying this material for quite some time to come.

GMail Based CRM and GMail Linkedin Plugin

I’m still trying to figure out what I need from a CRM.

I needed to create a homegrown adhoc solution to see how I prefer to work rather than have my process dictated to me by software.

Homegrown Solution

I created a quick CRM in a Google sheet.
I have a front page which summarizes:

• contact
• when last contacted
• what to do next
• state of lead

And then each contact has a sheet with their details and a log of contacts - that seems OK but requires maintenance outside of Google.

Alternatives

Then I stumbled over this blog post from Neil Patel, "10 GMail plugins all marketing professionals should consider"

As A result, I’ve installed the Rapportive chrome extension, which augments any homegrown CMS.

And looking through the features of the other tools mentioned it seemed as though Streak provided a lot of power and seemed to offer much of the functionality of followup.cc and boomerang

I’ve installed Streak to try it out.

I still have to evaluate FullContact which I think could augment Streak as well.

And if Streak doesn’t work out then I’ll have a look at ActiveInboxHQ

Streak seems to have a lot of power and I’m slowly working through the functionality but the delayed send and boxing seem quite useful so far.