How to improve your sales, make content engaging and why you should sack your clients

What we've covered over the last few weeks

Welcome to The Wrap Up 👋

Over the last few weeks we’ve covered: 👇

💭 Making your video content more engaging 

💭 Improving your sales conversions in one quick way

💭 Why sacking your clients is good for business

📺 And episode 6 is here. On it, Mike, Dan give their views on shock tactics, working for free and jumping on the bandwagon. Plus all the above subjects we’ve spoken about in the last month. We’ve got a new set-up, let us know what you think of it in the comments.

As with everything, these are just our views, and you don’t need to consider every single one. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing and make your business less shit.

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This week’s newsletter is going out to everyone in the community, both free and paid. 

Paid, if you want to head over to watch the latest episode then click here. 👇

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💭 Using engagement triggers in your video content - our final thoughts.

Comment from the community: 

The tips were brilliant, some quick wins (engagement hook) and some to build in (location changes or animation) - we’re already re-recording some of our videos and I feel way better about them, even before they get edited.

It’s 2022. Let’s be honest, there’s no reason to be creating shit video content. 📹

Whether you’re a one-person band or a multi-million-pound company with hundreds of employees - there’s so much out there on how to create decent content, if you’re not improving slightly every time, then you need to ask why? 

Some small businesses create better content with their phone than large businesses do with their entire marketing team. 

You don’t need to be smart and you don’t want to start annoying your viewers by making things confusing or having too much going on. 

You just want to use prompts as a trigger to pay attention, something that makes someone refresh their gaze and zone back into what you’re talking about. It all starts with researching your audience and knowing what they want to see, in a way that they want to see it, and then editing and filming the footage in a way that keeps people awake. 

Easy, right?

💭 Some of what Mike said:

With our content, you’ll notice we include words on screen, animation, and cutaways to other videos. 

We’re always doing something that triggers you to sit up and refresh your attention. If you’ve got someone sitting on a plain wall background, talking to the camera for 3 minutes in a monotonous voice it’s going to be boring and nobody is going to watch. So there’s no point making it in the first place. 

💭 And some of what Dan said:

With video, you need engagement triggers. And engagement triggers need to be happening at least every 15 seconds, some people say every 30 seconds. 

An engagement trigger is like a hook, it’s something that keeps people watching. So for instance, if you're a really boring fucking company talking about accounting software, right, you might have someone drop their pants every 15 seconds, just because it's weird and it breaks the monotony enough that people will then keep watching because they'll be watching for the next pants drop.

You're expecting someone in the world of social media to stop what they're doing, amongst all the other content they actually want to watch and they actually know about, you're asking them to stop what they're doing and watch a minute-long video from someone they don't know don't give a fuck about. 

We gave the community 8 quick and easy engagement triggers that you can try in your next round of video content to stop people from clicking off after 10 seconds. 

None of them are going to break the bank (most can be done on free editing software), and don’t worry, they can almost all be done by someone with very little editing experience - so what’s your excuse? 👀

Our community has started incorporating them into their videos and they’re looking tons better already. 

If you want to read more on how to engage your audience better on video and keep up good viewer retention, here she is 👇

Use these triggers to create more engaging video content. 📹

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💭 Improve your sales conversions by 100x - is it possible?

Comment from the community: 

Interesting stuff.

Our CRM sends an enquiry acknowledgement to customers straight away but I don't feel like it's personal enough. Naturally a lot of our enquiries come in out of office hours. Maybe I could extols the virtues of the improved conversion rate on the sales team.

Start by responding to them myself 😄

Not replying to leads within 5 minutes is killing your business. It sounds dramatic, but it is.

And we’re not just saying that, there are real stats done by real stats people to back it up. 

A study by LeadResponseManagement.org found that when B2B sales teams get back to leads in less than 5 minutes, their engagement and conversion rate multiplies drastically. 

But when it’s just you, or you’ve not yet got a sales team to filter your enquiries, it’s unrealistic to think you’re going to be replying to every lead that comes through within 5 minutes. 

So what does that mean for you? No more clients? Sales plummet? Family exile you because of your poor lead response time and you’re forced to live alone on a tropical island with only a volleyball to keep you company? 

When a lead gets in touch with a business, they’re almost ready to buy and 70% of the way through the buying decision. So, when they can’t get in touch, they’re off to a competitor.

As business owners, we don't like to appear salesy or come across as desperate. We assume our prospects feel the same way and that means we shy away from it.  

But the data actually says different…

Businesses that respond to leads in five minutes or less are 100x more likely to convert opportunities.

The problem is, on average, it takes B2B sales teams 42 hours to respond to a new lead, if at all, and 38% of those leads never reply.

We gave our community a handful of ways to overcome this slight issue. Here are 3 of them.

👉 Automate your lead notifications so you can’t miss them.

Mike’s business IAM studio uses Zapier, Pipedrive and Slack for notifying that there’s a new lead dropping in so everyone gets the ping. 

👉 Give self-service options.

If you find your customers are usually asking the same things over and over again, do something about it. 

👉Build a brand community.

It’s what everyone is doing, and it comes in extra handy at times like this.

Work out your lead response rate time:

⏱ Time/date of new lead - time/date of follow-up response = # time passed to respond

⌛️ Sum of time passed to respond for all leads/number of contacts = average time passed to respond.

What is it? Probably not under five minutes. 👀

So if you want to read more info on what we mean by automating, self-service and building a community you can head over and read the full details on the newsletter, plus the other couple of tips we’ve tried and tested for ourselves and found helpful.  

Improve your sales conversions by 100x with these easy steps.

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💭 Why “sacking” your clients is good for business - our last words on it.

❝ Comments from the community: 

Just read the blog post now and 💯% agree

After being in hospitality I have a much lower tolerance than most on this. I will sack a client straight away if it’s starting to get “tetchy”. Full refund, wish them the best and move on.

Don’t try and fix and focus on something bad when you can focus on the good relationships which will result in a better outcome.

It's something that took me years to get my head around (all that usual fear of not finding other clients) but once I did it made a big shift in business.

Great blog btw. Great read.

Not all customers and invoices are created equal.

But just because a client is difficult or you find them challenging to work with, doesn’t necessarily mean they need to be fired. Part of your job is to make clients happy - even the annoying ones.

Assuming you’ve experienced working with difficult people who put you in difficult situations, and that you also understand that in business as well as life, we don’t always get what we want.

Although if said client starts getting in the way of you being able to do your job properly, then we don’t blame you. Chop them.

Reasons we reckon it’ll be chop worthy:

1. If you’ve at least tried making the situation better and it’s still, well, shit. 

2. If they’re making you lose money.

3. If your team morale is suffering.

Any of the above are absolutely good enough reasons to part ways with a client. 

But you need to question - is it a you-shaped problem?

Do you not like working with someone because they challenge you on things you create? This one can go either way, because if they’re always trying to change the work you do for them then it’s likely you’re not the right person for their job, in which case, you should part ways and they can find someone who is.

But you might also be letting your ego get in the way of what the client wants and what you think is best. If you think what’s best isn’t what they’re suggesting, communicate your reasons why. Explain why you think what you’re producing is bang on the money and why you did it this way.

A client isn’t an idiot just because they didn’t love your proposal or work, maybe you’re the idiot for not listening to what the direction was that you needed to take with it. But then again, maybe they are an idiot for not listening to someone who knows best at what they do - there’s a fine line.

We spoke loads more about it in the newsletter and gave some tips on how to do the sacking-off in an as amicable a way as possible. 

Why “sacking” your clients is good for business.

 Our community were very heavily weighted with this one, too. Over the last few days there’s been loads of discussion about sacking clients and why it’s been the best thing they did.

Really helpful with getting me clear on what clients I need to sack and the best way to do it - so I can make more money with the clients I enjoy working with, instead. Thanks VAMO

If you’re not in the Slack and you’re a member of our private community (you get the paid weekly newsletters) then whack us an email and we’ll sort you out. 

👉 hello@viewsaremyown.social 

What are your thoughts on sacking a client? Ever done it? Regretted it immediately or never looked back? Let us know in the comments. 

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Want more detailed help and guidance with your business goals? 🤑

We’ve recently had a couple of community members (Mark Simpson, Peter Sumpton and Danny Donachie) in the VAMO office for a deeper dive on their businesses. 

So if you’re looking for more support and want clarity or advice on what you’re doing, what else you could be doing or how you can get there, we have now launched 1-2-1’s with Mike Winnet & Ian Darlington. You’ll hear us reference a lot about the previous business they built and sold and the ones they’re currently running. 

If you want a 60-90 minute session we can do it either over Zoom or in person. To enquire and book, use the link below and find a time that suits you. 👏

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As always, if you’re in it, please chuck any of your questions in our Slack, and let us know what your views on episode six are. 👏

And if you’re not in the private community and you want a bit more info on it before you decide to join us, you can head over and read our welcome newsletter here.

Again, all of you paid lot, if you want to head over to watch the latest episode then click here. 👇

See you next Tuesday.

VAMO 📺