At the recent Better Business Summit, run by Momentum Media. I gave a presentation about what to do when you find yourself “successful-busy”.
You may be familiar with this.
It’s that stage where everything’s going really well. Your business is growing and it looks like everything’s headed in the right direction except for one thing…
You find yourself under increasing pressure to GET. THINGS. DONE.
Questions, communications, tasks and a whole bunch more compete for your increasingly in-demand attention.
It’s a really common phase most business owners experience as their businesses grow.
One glance at our Journey to Leverage model explains a little about the main three phases business owners transition through on the way to building something that can run without us.
And right there in the middle lies the pain point none of us want to stick around in for too long; the dangerous middle.
There’s a conversation I often have with those just about to enter this zone – I call it THE DECISION POINT. It involves me asking whether you are ready to put in the work required to build a true business (i.e. one that no longer relies on the founder(s) for growth).
If the answer is anything other than ‘yes’, my advice is often to focus on building the best, most profitable lifestyle business you can.
If the answer however is positive, then the goal is to pass through the middle as quickly as possible.
To do so, there are three elements that are most key to ensure you master quickly:
- The way you’re managing workflow is effective.
- You’ve got the right team habits for managing time and energy.
- And a key third one around communication
At the Better Business session, I talked a lot about how businesses manage external communication (usually email) and internal communication, but there’s a third area…
…and it’s got a lot to do with client experience.
One of the challenges with any “knowledge” business – where the “product” is the application of expertise to other people’s situation to create a positive financial outcome – is how to best deliver this.
Traditionally and most usually, it’s about conversations.
You and the client, sit down. They talk about their situation and present their problems, and through various different mechanisms you present solutions and make them practical.
Whilst this is great, it’s also as you can understand, subject to two constraints: time and scale of delivery.
Let’s also be real. Whilst I would love to think that people engage more because of my sparkling wit and amazing conversational ability, the real truth is most want the outcome more than the information.
After all, if information was the answer, to quote Derek Sivers, we’d have all been knee-deep in Lamborghinis and six packs since the internet became a thing, right.
But when it comes to delivering your value via means other than you+client it’s easy to hit a bunch of challenges.
You can launch a portal, but clients still need the drive to use it.
You can create videos, but you gotta get people to watch them.
You can send that email communication, but people have to want to read it.
Scaling your communication is one of the most powerful things you can do to create a better client experience, but the rules are subtly different.
There are many ways to approach this and next month I’ll be sharing some of the most effective ways as part of our Client Experience mini-program.
Let me share one here though.
One big issue is when you approach 1-to-many communication like you’re writing a newsletter and it comes across as simply cold.
When you write a communication if you’re speaking to no one, that’s what you get. You get a communication without a target.
One of the easiest ways to improve the quality of your communication when it comes to client experience is if to write it as if you’re writing it to someone.
Instead of Hi everybody! or Dear Clients, try, Hey {first name}!
Instead of giving a broad overview of what you’re going to cover, tell a story about yourself and what’s happening.
Technology can really help with this. One of the benefits of email marketing tools is the ability to personalise communications in as many ways as you have fields, but here’s the real kicker.
If you really personalise your 1-to-many communications, ditch the keyboard and dictate.
Right now I’m walking around my office dictating this blog. Why? Well, firstly it’s quicker but also because I want it to sound like me.
That’s what happens when you dictate. You take your words, the terminology and you make it sound like you.
Over the past 12 months – maybe in part because of COVID – communication between advisers and clients has become not just more important, but much more appreciated and wanted.
Some of the research studies that came out post-COVID showed clients wanting more communication, and it led many of us to lean into this in ways we hadn’t before.
In doing so it’s helped many to systemise and scale a key part of their experience.
It’s a great opportunity, this experience game, and nailing the way you communicate en masse is one of the best ways to start.
