This is the idea that there has to be a receptive market for your product or your service. For those of you who are seeking an entrepreneurial life of freedom, this is another thing to contend with before you are truly free!

It’s tempting to think becoming your own boss means total autonomy and total freedom to live by your own rules! Unfortunately total autonomy also means extreme responsibility for yourself in personal, financial, and business matters. Becoming your own boss is not as liberating as most people make it out to be. Take the plunge! But have realistic expectations about that he cost of “total” freedom.

These can be viable forms of getting income that WAY outperforms your regular trade. However only engage in these with money you can afford to loose and be sure you’re education enough on the fundamentals before taking the leap.

Yes I talk primarily to wedding industry professionals, but anyone can and should listen to this podcast because the business and sales principles we discuss here are universal. The concrete application of the principles might differ depending on what business you are in, but you’ll be better of learning alongside this business community.

Apparently risk management isn’t just something for Other sectors of the economy. Small business owners and wedding industry professionals can profit from asking the question ”what could go wrong” or “what is the worst possible scenario and how can we plan for that?”

...the final comments on the topic since the first recording was interrupted by a phone call.

Calling up a referral doesn’t have to be hard. You already have some commonality with your mutual friend. Take up the conversation from there.

Taking the initiative is essential not just when you’re dealing with customers and prospective clients, but also when we’re dealing with fulfillment partners and other vendors we have to work with to make sure we have a happy client. If we don’t maintain the initiative when dealing with our fulfillment parters, the customer experience and other deliverables might suffer in the process.

With a clear course of direction for our clients to take, it’ll be a lot easier to move the sales process along.

Calling to debrief after you lose the deal is a worthy thing to do. You could learn about why you lost the deal in the first place (besides price) and learn about ways that you can improve your product or service delivery in the future. So yes you may have lost the deal, but make the call nevertheless.

The meeting of minds is a necessary prerequisite for getting into a business relationship. You shouldn’t get into one unless you’ve asked the questions to figure out if you’re in agreement when it comes to personality, goals, personal and corporate style and culture, budget and money and the overall vision for the project or the problem that is to be solved. This is another reason why it’s important in the sales process to ask the right questions.

Unless you’re skilled at handling sales conversations, you’ll find yourself only dealing with low hanging fruit every time someone hits you up on the phone or via DM. This is a case study using online retail to show how we increase our chances for closing the sale from radon contacts online.

The benefits of asking a lot of questions of your customers and prospective clients is that you get all the intel and insights that you need to improve your business delivery and the very nature of your product or service. So remember to ask questions!... the focus should be on the right kind of questions to ask!

Ratings and reviews are essential to getting residual income from repeat business and referrals. However when is the right time to ask for a review or testimonial? You should only do this AFTER the underlying customer service issues have been resolved and you’re sure that everyone is happy. Asking people to give you a review and rating while you’re still in the middle of a tussle is a recipe for disaster.

Wootlab is a an abuja based software development firm. This episode is not a promo for the company, but it’s a real life example of how follow up is important and why we ought to keep in touch and build relationships with our past clients.

The good news about being successful in selling is that it doesn’t depend on how good you talk, or how well you can toast. Being good here requires you to ask the right questions of your prospective clients. If you have the sheer talent or the bubbly personality, it won’t hurt! But anyone can be good at sales because it’s all about learnable skills. Being good at asking the right questions begins with learning the right frameworks for you and your particular context.

Whether the break up tactic gets the conversation going or not, it all good! This is because a “yes” answer is fine because it means you could be working together. A “no” response on the other hand means you now have more time to look for other people better suited to working with you. Of course all this only makes sense if you adopt an “active” philosophy to growing your sales rather than a “passive” one.

You should ask questions about the client’s decision making process because it’s not always the case that the person you’re speaking to now will be important in making the buying decision tomorrow. Find out who should be a part of the decision making process today and make sure they are involved in the conversation. This will make “sealing the deal” in the future a lot easier.

This is a tactic used in the past by business people to “guilt” their clients into resuming a conversation when it looks like the latter has gone “ghost”. The break up message can be a useful tool to gauge whether they were genuinely interested in the first place, or if circumstances have changed on their end so that procuring your goods or services is no longer a priority.

These are the kinds of conversations we should be having with prospective clients when people DM us on Instagram, or call us from Google. Questions that help you figure out your clients will help you determine whether they will be worth taking the money at all, and it’ll also help you figure out the details that will go into delivering a reliable quote.

Being talented and passionate about our business is no guarantee that we are going to be successful. These were some of the things that were discussed at a photography business Roundtable that I attended recently. Apart from this, there were also discussions on the importance of workplace culture and business culture. Discussions on the importance of building customer loyalty and goodwill for the business, as well as some of the possible opportunities that are available for creative in the Tony ELUMELU foundation.

“Following up” with a customer or client is something that should be done consistently if we hope to establish a relationship with clients and secure repeat purchases and referrals. It doesn’t have to be technical! Any system that you can use to keep track of past conversations and future things to look to will be fine. Also make it a habit to record personal details like names, dates, and relationships so you don’t slip up in conversations when you run into them in person.

Another type of conversation you should be having with previous customers and clients is, where you try to gauge where they’re at in their personal and professional development. These changing circumstances often reflect new avenues that we can use to bring value into their lives. However don’t be robotic about this and realize that VALUE is the name of the game here.

Customer success conversations are chit chats where we figure out if the client had a fun time of working with us and if we were able to help them achieve their goals. This is absolutely essential to making sure they come back for repeat business, and they bring their friends, families and associates in turn.

Issues of personal and professional etiquette are important because of how they tie in with building our businesses as service based professionals. This episode is a preview of some of the trainings coming down the pipe with “Etiquette with Eti” on all matters including corporate image branding, sales and communications.

So they’re excited to meet with you? Find out why! This is important so you can gauge the expectations that the client is coming into the meeting with. Without this knowledge you won’t know if you have the right agenda for the meeting, or if you guys are suited to work together.

Why should you keep in touch with your former clients? Because life and business is an adventure. It’s good to have future playmates for the games that may arise.

Sometimes the reason why we are demotivated in running our businesses is because we don’t have enough revenue generating activities on the books. These activities keep the deposits coming in, keeps the account balance growing, and keeps the morale high. If you suspect that your demotivation might be sign of depression however, mental health professionals are readily available for professional help.

It seems strange but there are people who help others not because of what they hope to get in return, but they do so out of “the milk of human kindness” and other fuzzy motives that we can’t put a finger on. This episode explores ideas about how to maintain the relationship without things getting “tacky” and awkward.

The fear that calling yourself a vendor leads to commoditization is a valid one. Vendors are often undifferentiated and any one will be as good as the other. However the key to being differentiated might not be what we call ourselves, but how we conduct our businesses and build relationships with our clients.

They way we work is changing and we often find that we’re now working in isolated cramped conditions that throw our bodies and spinal alignment out of wack. Being mindful of this is the first step to working better. So also is proper Rest and exercise. Good news for some of us especially since occupational therapy is becoming a thing in most parts of the world now. Work better and healthier because we can’t make a sale if we’re frail.

Using the phone to seal the deal or diagnose with a customer is the most efficient way to go! Much better than using text or email. If this scenario doesn’t convince you, then I guess nothing will.

There has to be more to life than buying and selling of goods and commodities. However since money is a medium of exchange and a key determinant to the kinds of adventures and experiences you can enjoy, it actually is fundamental to you living the kind of life you desire. Chasing money doesn’t mean downplaying all that’s important to the human experience. Money buys stuff and gives you opportunities. That’s all! Other conversations on quality of life and happiness in life are merely tangential to it and not directly related to the pursuit of money.

There’s no such thing as a difficult client! There are only failed expectations that weren’t met or properly understood. We have to take the initiative as professionals in the first place to be sure we properly understand the goals our clients are aiming for and so reduce the incidents of dealing with “difficult clients”.

Podcasting can be a fun venture but is of very little use to anyone if you’re not going to do this consistently over the long haul. A content calendar is key to keeping things moving, and be sure to consider what the goals and business returns are if any!

It’s important to determine as quickly as possible whether you are talking to a client, customer, or prospect. This has implications for how you drive the rest of the conversation. Figuring out the clients and customers is easy! Prospects on the other hand pose more difficulty. It all boils down to the nature of the questions you ask.

Yes our clients know what they want but mostly on a superficial level. We have to take the initiative to ask questions that get to the subconscious of the problems they’re trying to solve and the grand visions they’re aiming to. Stop being exasperated every time you’re faced with a “confused” client. Take the initiative and ask the right questions to be sure you understand where they’re coming from and where they’d like to get to.

Clients seem to lie at times because we’re involved in commercial relationships where they have a lot at stake. The solution isn’t to bemoan that fact or call them out for lying. Rather we should look for ways to build trust so that they can let their guard down. We should also look for ways to make the prospect of dealing with us a “risk free proposition”.

Whether you are dealing with total strangers or with people that you know intimately well, you should always be asking questions to be sure that you understand the problem that they have or the creative vision that they are trying to achieve. If you don’t understand the total parameters of what you are working with, you might come off looking totally unprofessional if things don’t go according to plan at the end of the day. Always stick to your process whether you are dealing with friends, family, or total strangers off the street.

It’s easy to feel betrayed and overwhelmed in personal service industries when it seems like you went over and beyond for a client and the whole thing backfired. The solution isn’t to blame the client for being selfish but to realize that you had a hand in setting up the whole experience! If you had done a better job of setting expectations, then the whole affair could have gone differently. Ask questions in the beginning to be sure that you understand the client and the vision they’re running after. Also have the money conversations to be sure that in all scenarios you can meet their needs with enough profit margins for you and your crew at the end of the day. The client is only looking out for themselves. Ask the right questions and look out for yourself as well.

Conversation outlines can also be used to foster trust. One of such ideas is expressed by Tom Hopkins in his selling approach. The idea behind this is to establish rapport by showing commonality in your conversations. You should also try to show some credibility and competency to show yourself as the trustworthy alternative.

This is a response to a question that I got over the weekend about who I am, what I do, and the nature and the purpose of this podcast.

Talking to clients can be unnerving for both you and them. You can make this problem easier by having a simple conversation outline to direct the conversation. This will help both of you arrive at a clear agenda and what the next step should be. This can be as simple as having an appropriate greeting, and then moving straight to the intent behind your call. After that you should ask some questions to be sure that your assumptions are correct. It is only after you do this that you can make a proposal or a suggestion about what the next best step should be. After carrying out this exercise, be sure to get them to make a decision on the specific items that have been discussed.

The POGO framework is another conversation prompt that is built around questions. To be effective at this you should ask questions about the Person, their Organization, their Goals, and the Obstacles that they face. You’ll find that this is a simple and useful framework for carrying on with social conversations and in networking circles. The spirit behind it? By being interested in other people, we get to grow our influence and social capital.

The 3 “why” conversation framework is a handy tool for driving conversations when you are trying to get to the root, and the most important problem that your client is trying to solve in buying your product or service. It only when you have “hit the spot” that you’ll have a happy client at the end of it all.

The “W” conversation framework is a simple conversation outline that’ll come in handy next time you are talking to a prospective client, or you’re at a networking session. For conversations with clients this will help you tease out what’s most important to them and the key things that you have to hit with your service delivery. At networking sessions this framework will help you sort through the dozens of people you’ll be meeting and quickly figure out who will be worth spending more time with outside of the networking session.

"In person selling", "relationship marketing" and "customer experiential marketing" are euphemisms that have been created to talk about the dirty word “sales”. Whether you like it or not, there are benefits to getting on the train!

Yes it is possible to “freestyle” with clients and when you’re mingling at events, but that is a more stressful approach because of the mental exertion required every time you’re in a new social context or conversation. Also there’s the problems of scaling your sales and marketing efforts when you “freestyle” because you can’t teach everyone to “do it” like you. So freestyle at your peril! Or templatize what you can and watch things grow.