It is Halloween time and there is certainly nothing scarier than worrying about how to be a successful rainmaker. So, in my next two articles — straddling Halloween — I will give you 13 tips to help you. I have written about a few of these before, but they are always worth repeating and remembering (see tip number three!).
- Marketing is Pure Statistics: Ask anyone — I mean anyone — how they got their clients or customers, especially the first ones, and it is almost always completely serendipitous. There is no consistency. Indeed, there is a joke that 80 percent of your marketing budget/time is wasted — you just don’t know which is the 80 percent. It is all so completely unpredictable. But this should not cause despair. By use of pure mathematics, if you know you cannot predict outcomes from independent trials, then the best chances of success will come from making as many marketing attempts as possible.
- It is OK to Fail: I even recommend it! Don’t be beaten down by failure. Most of your marketing attempts — especially at first — will end in failure. Indeed, the odds are that 99 percent, or even 100 percent, of your attempts will fail for quite a while. Use them as a learning tool — be brutally honest with yourself why something didn’t work — and continuously rework your marketing strategy until you become a major success.
- Repeat Yourself: I recently wrote an article about this — and I mentioned it above — and I am re-mentioning it here. It is kind of something you don’t like to really think about, but like it or not you are not front-and-center in the minds of others. They have their own lives to lead. So if you want your messages to be heard and remembered you have to constantly tell people about what your expertise is — and then repeat it multiple times. Of course, you want to do it in a way that is not annoying.
- Get Out & About: This is simpler math. If you “get out and about” something “might” happen. If you don’t “get out and about” then it is pretty certain that nothing will happen. You have to get out of your chair and out into the community of your industry or the odds of success fall dramatically.
- Knowledge is Power: When you are out and about, you need something to talk about that is both interesting and useful. This is essentially the Power Niche that I have written extensively about — and yes, my book on this is coming out soon. I will not go over it here, but you can see my prior articles on this subject or wait for the book, only a few months away. Once you are “out and about” talking about your Power Niche, you become unstoppable as a rainmaking force.
- Be Enthusiastic: Who wants to hang out with a sad sack? Answer: no one! So don’t be that. Instead, let your passion and joie de vivre out. Have fun. Make it clear how much you love what you are doing — perhaps the thrill in your Power Niche. You will be astonished how contagious your enthusiasm is. And even if you are faking it a bit at first, you will find to your amazement that pretty soon you aren’t faking it at all. That’s how it works.
Okay, happy Halloween everyone. Hopefully this will ease your rainmaking fears if you have any to begin with.
Bruce Stachenfeld 