I’m an information junkie and have loads of unread books and information.
For a long time, I was addicted to signing up to success and business mailing lists. Anything that promised me “secret” ingredients to getting customers or making money…and I would sign up so fast that I almost gave myself whiplash a number of times.
I chased success a lot, and after some time, it got overwhelming just keeping track of all the so called business success secrets.
This was until a few months ago when I got the mother of all secrets, and it was so off the normal track that I almost refused to accept it.
The Tip: Stop chasing prospects and trying to get online and offline visibility.
Instead: Start serving the customers ahead of you and serve them so well that they never forget you for the rest of their life.
That’s it.
Nothing more, nothing less.
By the way, the word customer here also includes prospects – treat them as if they are already your customers.
Don’t focus so much on whether or not they buy from you. Instead, consistently focus on ensuring that they get an outstanding experience with you and your business.
Of course this means that your prospects are also people who fit your ideal customer criteria so that you don’t waste time and energy trying to serve people who don’t need or want what you’re selling.
This advice literally changed my life and got me thinking in a different way.
Since I got this business success tip, I’ve done the following to clear clutter and create space for those amazing customers:
1. Unsubscribed from 90% of the mailing lists I’m subscribed to
This took almost 3 days to complete for both my personal and business emails. I didn’t know how bad my subscription addiction was until I started purging one morning…and hadn’t made much headway by evening!
I’ve now installed Unroll.me in my Gmail account to unsubscribe me from unnecessary lists. My daily Unroll.me roundups showed that I was subscribed to 5-10 new mailing lists per week.
By the time I completed the purging process, I had unsubscribed to over 250 e-newsletters! This means that I was wasting a lot of hours online reading stuff that will not build my life and business.
Unroll.me is an amazing tool. It’s free and works with free email accounts like Yahoo or Gmail.
2. Reconnected with past clients and prospects
They were all happy to hear from me and we had amazing conversations that led to some of them signing up for further coaching now that their lives have moved to new levels.
This happened without me selling or pitching anything to them. I just held deep conversations with the intention of helping.
3. Put aside all my plans for online and offline visibility
I had all these plans to go really BIG on social media. Plus I’d started writing 3 blog posts a week and this takes a huge amount of time – it takes 3 to 5 hours to research a topic, write a 1,500 word article, clean it up, get graphics, and post it on the blog or send the article to my mailing list.
I was also about to launch 2 new Facebook pages for my other programs and implement a comprehensive networking campaign.
All these means that I’ve been spending a lot of time and money trying to get clients instead of focusing on the prospects and clients that I already have.
4. Giving my current clients amazing coaching experiences
This is because I’m fully focused on helping them overcome their obstacles to success. It’s no longer about working with clients, but more of giving every person I’m working with the most powerful experience of their life…in each and every coaching session.
Incidentally, I got spontaneous feedback from a client this week when she commented that, “You’re a true coach! You didn’t tell me what to do; you just helped me make a decision through your questioning.” She’d been stuck at one level for almost a month and we got an amazing breakthrough in an hour!
5. Made some huge whooping mistakes in the process
…and learnt to laugh at myself more. I’m in a training program that requires participants to fail at least once a week. I can see a host of articles coming up from these experiences alone…
Conclusion
As I slowed down, I also got clear about how all the pieces of my business fit together and how I was going to build my business for the rest of the year. The blueprint that emerged is so easy to implement that it feels like cheating.
All it takes for this process to work is a willingness to slow down. Just slow down on what you’re doing so that you can speed up.
Think of it like driving a manual car. If you want to change gears and speed up, you have to take your foot off the accelerator so as to step on the clutch and change gears.
Take your foot off the marketing and promotions accelerator in your business and really give the best to the person in front of you.
Do this one thing in your business over the next 3 months – whether you’re selling a product or service – and watch your business grow.
I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the level of success this tip will help you achieve in a short while.
(Image credit: nattavutat at Free Digital Photos)
