Episode 08: The Advice You Need to Actually Get More Clients

Tiffany Barry (00:00):
Welcome to the passion to profit show, where we talk about how to scale your passionate business into a profitable empire. I’m Tiffany Barry, a marketing expert and relationship marketing enthusiast. Join me for 20 minutes or less every week to talk about business, scaling up CEO, mindset, freedom and flexibility for entrepreneurs level up to six and seven figures. Let’s get started.

Tiffany Barry (00:27):
Welcome to this week’s episode of passion to profit and buckle in because this week I’ve got a cup full of tea, and I am standing on my soap box for this one because everyone is trying to get your attention and teach you you how to get more clients, especially when it comes to using social media. I swear at least five times a day. I see posts go up in Facebook groups asking how to get more clients. And inevitably there are 30 to 50 responses for every post and rarely any clarifying questions being asked of the original poster, which is on almost your sign. That in most cases, the advice that’s being given will be unfortunate regurgitation of the same information over and over and over. And here’s the thing I’m in a lot of Facebook groups, I network with a lot of people, okay. Many people loudly handing out this generic advice are going in later posting about their own struggles, getting clients.

Tiffany Barry (01:27):
And that’s why I’m on my soapbox about this, because it is incredibly damaging to, to people to be handing out this generic marketing advice that has no basis in anything, but some go or blog article that you found on the internet from somebody who, you know, learned how to make six figures in their business. And now they’re teaching everybody how to do that thing, but here’s the thing. Many answers are variations of the same things, the same things we see over and over. Just talk to more people post consistently on social media, create content that shares value and solves problems, book more coffee jets and connect calls, network and Facebook groups. And yes, I have absolutely given out superficial marketing advice like base level marketing advice. 99% of the time, I am asking clarifying questions along with it. I’m saying, oh, you’re a career coach.

Tiffany Barry (02:28):
My clients usually see a lot of really great results when they’re networking on LinkedIn. Have you tried that? I’d love to ask you a few more questions. Um, you know, I’ll ask to jump in their DMS, I’ll ask it right there in the thread, depending on whether I think the advice that give would be beneficial for other people, or if it’s gonna be really specific to their business. But it’s, it’s a conversation it’s not, uh, what I saw in a Facebook group just yesterday where it was, you know, um, a, a marketing, uh, coach quote coach. Um, I’m, I’m I I’m trying not to throw a lot of shade here. I’m really trying, cuz there are a lot of really amazing social media managers who know what the hell they’re doing. There’s a ton of marketers and experts who know what they’re doing. And, and so this is really more aim towards like people who have no business giving out that advice and are just trying to look for a way to stand out and talk about things.

Tiffany Barry (03:26):
And in a Facebook group the other day, somebody said, well, I always tell my clients to start with the video first record the video first and then repurpose all your content from the video because it’s easier. And I’m like, well, not as necessarily, it’s it’s not easier for a lot of people. It ends up costing a lot of money in editing. When you have to take out your ums and your, your tangents and it can be really unorganized and, and detrimental to the content repurposing process, right? So not every, um, instance is, uh, not every, not every post, not every instance, not every question is something that you can, you can answer with like really generic advice, right. Especially when we’re talking about marketing. And like I said, most answers that I see in Facebook groups like that are variations of talk to more people consistently right on and on and on.

Tiffany Barry (04:23):
But here’s the thing. And I know I say that a lot, but when that’s not working, because let’s be honest, you’ve likely already done one or more of those things, right? Those people giving that generic advice, don’t know what to tell you. So the responsibility for failing falls back on your shoulders and it’s not that what they’re teaching is wrong. I talk a lot about talking to more people and, and posting consistently on social media, showing up creating content that, that resonates with your audience on the surface, what they’re teaching isn’t wrong necessarily, but it might be wrong for you. And the problem here is that without a clear strategy and without teaching, which client getting actions should be your priority and how to actually implement them, the chances of you actually getting more clients are kind of hit or miss. So I know that’s a really long and drawn out way of introducing this week’s topic, which is, um, here’s the advice that you actually need to get more clients when you want, when you’re tempted to go into a Facebook group and, and, and say, how do I get more clients help?

Tiffany Barry (05:37):
This is what you actually need to hear. All right. Now I want to preface this by saying that a lot of the, the, the struggles that I see people having, getting clients comes down to the fact that there isn’t a lot in their corner. There isn’t a lot of information. Um, there, isn’t a lot of evidence that, that showcases that they’re trustworthy, that people who hire them are putting their money in the right person. They’re investing in the right service. They’re, um, gonna get the results that they want. Right. So my very first thing, when I start working with a new client, when I’m coaching a new student in my skyrocket to profit marketing program, the very first thing that I’m gonna do is look at whether they’re set up for success because no one and I mean, no one is an overnight success. There is a always a story behind every claim of overnight success, even quick success.

Tiffany Barry (06:42):
And you know, the ones I’m talking about this is the, I made 5k with just one email or I made a hundred K last month. Let me show you how, um, this one trick got me seven clients last week from Instagram. Okay. So I talk often about my own journey of just busting it for years building and selling businesses. Um, freelancing, I, I talk a lot about being stuck at that one to two K a month forever. And it took me really looking at my sales process and getting specific training on that before I was able to scale my business and quit my job. Right. Because for me having the audience and marketing was not the issue, I could build a community, I just couldn’t convert them. Right. So I was able to figure out exactly what internal problem I needed to solve. That was that my sales process was nonexistent.

Tiffany Barry (07:39):
And I didn’t know how to run a sales call. And so I hired a coach to teach me how to do that. So yes, I set a goal to match my cushy corporate salary and benefits in three weeks. And I did beat my goal. I signed more than five K in new clients in 18 days, and I was making eight to 10 K per month in less than four months. So that six figures, if you average it out right, was amazing. And to this day, I’m really proud of myself. Um, I don’t know that I could do it again that quickly it’s scary. And I was highly motivated. So that was really working in my favor, but it is possible, right? However, it was only possible because I, I fixed that internal problem. Right. And, and I hired a coach to help me do that.

Tiffany Barry (08:24):
And I was set up for success to begin with. Right. So quick side note, if marketing and social selling is that thing for you. Let me invite you to check out the skyrockets of profit coaching program. I have a link to the Free Masterclass in the podcast description, or you can go to my website, TiffanyEBarry.com and check it out. Um, but back to what I was talking about. So, um, because I had those essential building blocks for success in place when I actually applied what I was learning with that sales coach, I saw success very quickly, right? So the, the three things that you have to have in place to see success, if you want big results, you need to set yourself a for success too, right? So you need a portfolio or case studies and or testimonials. Now this is gonna depend, um, specifically on your, on your, your business.

Tiffany Barry (09:28):
You know, if you’re a VA, you might not necessarily have, um, a portfolio, but like a graphic design, your wood, but you might have testimonials and you might have, um, you know, people who specifically talk about how you help them, right? But whatever it looks like for your business, there is no way around this. People need to know that they can trust you and that you’re qualified to work with them right now. The second thing you need is an offer or a package that is absolutely a no-brainer for your potential clients. Okay. I see so many people, especially, you know, VAs, bookkeepers, they’re they talk about, oh, my clients hire me because I give them back more time. Well, business owners are not hiring you to have more time or freedom. Like yes, are, those are benefits to hiring you, right? But the reason they’re hiring you is because you bring something to the table, you are an expert at getting done.

Tiffany Barry (10:26):
You are an expert at, um, you know, taking all of the little tasks that pile up in their day and getting them organized and off their plate. You know, like you think beyond just what you do that gives them more time and freedom. Okay. You need to be able to break down your off, not just your offer, but also your process. You know, I found that clients really love when you can show them how you’ll lead them through their project, what that process looks like for them. Okay. Now the third and final thing, you need to see success to set yourself up for success. Here is an audience and that’s just it. I know it sounds really scary because people are like, well, I don’t have an email list yet. I don’t have a social media following it. I don’t have enough connections on LinkedIn.

Tiffany Barry (11:17):
Don’t have a Facebook group. That’s okay. Make one, start building a group. If it works for your business, start making connections on LinkedIn. If that’s where you’re gonna be start growing and talking to people on Instagram, if that’s where you’re gonna be, right? You need people to actually sell to whether that’s an email list, a social media fall following a Facebook group, connections on LinkedIn, whatever that looks like for you. You need an audience. You need people to actually sell to. You need people to help. So you’ve gotta start making those connections. Even if it’s small at first, you don’t have to have a gigantic social media following to make money. Um, you know, I’ve worked with clients who were multiple six figure businesses or more, and they had 350 400 followers on Instagram. Um, I took on one client who was, um, you know, making money handover fist and had 101 followers, a on Instagram.

Tiffany Barry (12:13):
Um, but they had, you know, built up their connections on LinkedIn to over a thousand. So there was a lot of people in their professional network that we could talk to. Right? So whatever that looks like for you, set yourself up, set yourself up for success and start building an audience. Now, now once you have that done, once you have those testimonials, once you are building up your audience, you, you don’t have to wait for these things to all happen. You can start working as you’re putting these things together. Um, but these are, those are the three things that you need to make sure you’re getting put in place ASAP. Okay. Now there are three other things that you need to be doing three main activities goals that you need to be doing to actually find clients. Okay. So briefly I’ll touch on all three and then we’ll deep dive.

Tiffany Barry (13:06):
So one you need to have on point messaging, you need to be creating on point messaging in your marketing. Okay. Two, you need to better conversations, not just go talk to people, but let’s, let’s dive in a little bit on what exactly you should be saying and who to talk to. Okay. And then the third thing is you need to look your social media a little bit differently, get a new perspective on this. Okay. So those are the three kind of essential, um, sides to the activities you’re gonna be doing to actually getting clients on social media. Okay. So let’s dive into messaging first in marketing messaging is everything okay. I know that might sound a bit dramatic, but it’s really important for real. Um, it’s important because it allows you to speak to really specific group of people and really dial in your messaging.

Tiffany Barry (13:59):
I say all the time that, you know, whenever I’m working with a client or I’m, I’m talking with one of my students in the skyrockets, a profit program, I’m always talking about how you’re messaging. You want people to, to read it, to feel it, to absorb it. And, and for them to be like, wow, this person is a psychic. They know me, right. They know my, my dreams, my hopes, my struggles, um, you know, they feel what I feel. This is an opportunity to practice some high level empathy with, with your audience, right? So if you quick for messaging, that’s super on point and dialed in. All right. Um, now one, you wanna focus on your ideal clients’ goals and desires. Just as much as their pain points, people are kind of getting a little burned out on pain point marketing, um, and that’s marketing where like, you’re only talking about where they’re struggling and how awful it is.

Tiffany Barry (14:57):
And, you know, clients nowadays wanna see just as much about how you’ll help them achieve, you know, X, Y, Z is how you’ll help them avoid or get out of their current frustration. Now you’ll also to have better marketing messaging. You also wanna do regular market research to help you stand out from your competitors. But I always caution my students to make sure you’re in a good mindset during this time. Okay. Because you wanna avoid second guessing yourself in the process. You wanna be peeking in on what your competitors are doing. Take note of what’s working really well, take note of what is not, what you don’t like and where maybe you see some gaps that make you unique. Okay. But do it when you’re in a good head space. Trust me on that one. You also want to ditch the industry jargon in your messaging and talk like your people talk, use the same words they do, literally the same words.

Tiffany Barry (15:58):
And if you’re not sure what those are, I recommend scheduling connection calls with people who are kind of similar to your ideal clients and have yourself an informative chat and take note of what, how do they describe what they’re struggling with? How do they describe their goal? That’s gonna be key to you, like getting inside their head, right? Because ultimately you want your marketing messaging to connect with your audience and their emotions. Right? And I talk a lot about using stories to do this, and also take it a step further and infuse all of your content with your personality. You know, people talk about your brand story and your brand voice. And, and that’s very true in your marketing messaging. Um, and when I say messaging, I really mean the emails you send the copy that’s on your website, the social media posts, the, the captions, um, you know, even down to how you talk to people, connect calls and how you approach coffee chats, that kind of thing, right.

Tiffany Barry (16:58):
You wanna really dial in your messaging, um, and you want it to be you right now. This can be your online persona. You, right. This can absolutely be the, you know, I, I say that it’s like the, the internet costume that we put on, um, as business owners and, you know, YouTube personalities, do it, um, speakers on stages, do it. You know, you, you have a side of you that people see when you’re doing that public access stuff, and then you have your, your private side. Right. And a lot of times those are different people and that’s okay. Um, but you want your messaging to really embody the values of your, your company, of your business, of your, your philosophies and your services and all of that. Right now, you also to have more clients, you need to have better conversations with them before their clients.

Tiffany Barry (17:48):
One of the best and worst pieces of advice I hear is to just talk to people and your business will grow. And in all fairness, that’s perfect advice when you’re brand new, especially when you’re trying to hit those first, like three to five K months, right? Unfortunately when you’re scaling your business, say to six figures or 10 K months, it’s awful advice. You simply do not have the time anymore to sit and talk to everyone all the time, unless you are purely 100% a group coaching coach where everything you’ve done is pre-made. And then all you have is time to promote it. Then, you know, like then that that’s really the only way that that’s sustainable. Um, and most coaches in my experience are doing a variety of things. Some of them might be, um, have one-on-one coaching, they’ve got their group program. Some of them might do one-on-one consulting projects.

Tiffany Barry (18:43):
Um, if you’re running a service based business, you might have a teaching program or course somewhere in your business to help you scale, but you might just be, you know, bound by how much time you have. So you don’t have time to sit and talk to everyone. You’ve gotta be really intentional about who you talk to and how so to do this. I like to think of everyone, I meet as falling into one or more buckets. And I have an entire section of my click up devoted to keeping track of all of these different relationships. Okay. So I have collaboration or referral partners. I have peers. Um, I have influential people that I wanna follow and or learn from. And then I have potential clients. And for each of these buckets, I like to think of a few characteristics that will help me identify the ’em from the outside.

Tiffany Barry (19:32):
So as I’m having conversations with these people, I can ask more qualifying questions and further sort them into a bucket. And for those that don’t fit into a bucket, you know, they’re, they’re kind of the blessed and release people. Um, you know, unless I make friends with someone and I wanna keep in touch right now, here is where I see a lot of people go wrong. They either get stuck in endless superficial conversations that go nowhere, or they find themselves in a position where they don’t know how to transition from getting to know someone to a sales conversation. Right? And remember this whole podcast episode, we’re talking about how to actually get clients, right? So you don’t wanna be stuck in either one of those places, but here’s the thing you are not trying to slightly move someone into a sales conversation. That’s DM sales mistakes 101.

Tiffany Barry (20:24):
Instead you wanna get to know someone, you wanna find things that you have in common build rapport. And then you wanna ask them questions that allow the other person to reveal their problems, right? If they’re having trouble growing their podcast. And it makes sense for you offer to be a guest boom collab partner, right? If they’re struggling with some limiting beliefs and you happen to coach on exactly that offer to share free training, you created last month, boom, potential coaching student. If you’re a VA, um, and you run across somebody who is looking for recommendations and, and you know, you can be their night in training armor, shoot your shot, boom, new client, all right. It all starts with you leading the conversation where you want it to go. All right, ask questions, figure out what it is the other person needs, and then offer to share the ways you can help.

Tiffany Barry (21:20):
Sometimes this is a service you offer. Other times it opens doors for you to be a connector or a referral partner or a collaborator. These are all valuable relationships and they all deserve equal opportunity space on your networking board. All right. But you’re not gonna know who’s gonna fall into which bucket right out the gate, until you start asking those questions until you start having the right kind of conversations, and you are asking the questions that are going to get them to reveal whatever it is they’re struggling with so that you can be that connector, that provider, the referral partner collaborated all of those things right now, as we are talking about taking this a step further, okay. Um, we’re using social media in our marketing process. We are actively trying to find clients when you’re looking for meaningful ways to do that. Using social media seems like a no-brainer, it’s organic, it’s free.

Tiffany Barry (22:25):
All it costs is your time. And that’s often a preferred resource to spend when you’re scaling so much. So that in my skyrocket, it’s a profit program. I actually don’t talk about ads in the core program because most people aren’t there yet. Instead, what I do is we have an entire masterclass on incorporating paid ads into your marketing strategy. G that happens a bit later so that it hits when you’re ready. So with organic marketing, it’s important to really look at how you’re using social media, change your perspective on it. Okay. We wanna be using it strategically, or you’re likely to get sucked into the black hole of the internet. That’s that when you don’t use social media strategically, it’s so easy to just start scrolling right now, when we’re talking about using social media strategically, that really starts with what platforms to use. And I very much subscribe to the idea that you should choose one or two platforms and master them before expanding onto other platforms.

Tiffany Barry (23:31):
So as you scale, you’ll have more content in your content bank. You can easily repurpose that content for an everywhere as a visibility strategy, across a myriad of platforms. So no matter where you are in that process, you wanna be selective about the pro the platforms that you’re using. Okay. So what I mean by that is, is kind of counter to the advice of go where your ideal clients are. I see that a advice a lot, but I recommend thinking about it a little differently, taking it a step further. You wanna go where your people are. Yes. But really you wanna be where they go to find solutions to their problems. If your ideal clients are moms who use Pinterest to find crafts and activities for their kids, and you run online art classes for kids, Pinterest is probably the place for you to be while Pinterest is more specifically a visual search engine, rather than a social media platform, you kind of get the gist, right?

Tiffany Barry (24:30):
It’s just as important, um, where you are as how you’re using it though. So I want you to get away from this idea. You know, we’re talking about finding clients, right? I want you to get away from this idea that you can magically attract people to you just by putting out great content and then waiting, because there is a sea of people, all competing for attention on social media apps. So if you’re working on organic strategy, that’s no paid ads on social media, you’ve gotta make your content attractive and do the attracting yourself. And this is what I mean by getting a new perspective on social media. If you want to actually find clients, okay, get really clear on what you do, who you help and how to work with you, and then go out there and find people who need your magic. Engage with them, use, um, hashtags to find them find, um, influencers that they hang out with.

Tiffany Barry (25:26):
Um, find online communities that they follow, um, engage with people there, go find them, build relationships with them, invest in their goals, um, ask them about, you know, what are they celebrating, be there for them when you see them have a story about them having a tough day, right? You use social media to be social, right? When you’re looking for clients on social media, you’ve got to have all of these pieces working together. And I understand that that can sound sometimes really daunting. So take it one step at a time, set yourself up for success, right? Get at your, you know, your testimonials in line, your case studies. If you’ve got a portfolio, put your portfolio together, put your services and, and your packages and your offers into, you know, um, easily digestible pieces that are, are really heavy on the impact and value. And, you know, have a clear process for you start working with a client so you can walk them through that. Okay. When you’ve got the content and the messaging and the solid foundation and a connection strategy, all being backed by a proven track record of success, you’ll find that you’ve got everything you need to generate endless leads and sign more clients with ease.

Tiffany Barry (26:52):
That’s it for this episode of passion to profit, if you found it helpful, insightful, or just entertaining subscribe, wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. And if you’re ready, scale your business from passion to six figure profits, don’t forget to watch the free masterclass, Tiffanyebarry.com/masterclass.