Yesterday, I listened to a call put on Eben Pagan and Dave Lakhani.  The interview was put on to promote Dave’s new book, How To Sell When Nobody’s Buying.  There was a lot of great points, but there was one in particular that I took away from the chat.

It was that of partnering with your real world clients so that when they needed your service, you were the natural selection.

Looking back on all the client’s I had over the years, I can honestly say that my best ones were the ones I, in my mind, had partnered with.  This includes mom and pop retail stores and multi-million dollar colleges.  There was way more to those transactions than basic client/provider services.

So, after pondering that thought, I came up with 5 steps that should get you in your next client’s door.

Step 1: Decide who your client needs to be

Nothing in life is achieved without first making up your mind and laying down some sort of groundwork.  That being said, decide who you want your next five clients to be.

Looking in my queue here, I have a well established local greenhouse, a pretty big car dealership, a women’s health organization and a couple others.  Those are the clients I am targeting specifically.  A few of those are through partnerships with marketing agencies.  A couple are from my own contacts.  But I want those five to be my next clients.

Step 2: Figure out what they need. Find their pain.

Every organization has a target market.  Before even meeting your prospective client, figure out what it is.  Examine their current advertising trends and learn from what they’re doing already.

Are they leading edge?  Do they convey personality?  Are they progressive in their technology?  Answer those questions and then start to figure out how it is you can help them.

The clients I went over in Step 1 are all pretty progressive.  Yes, even the greenhouse wants to gain a social media presence for contests and promotions.  The car dealership has an off-road branch (atv’s, motorcycles, etc) which lends itself to the ‘fun’ of social networking.

Step 3: Find your in

Strategic partnerships are wonderful things.  If you have a personal contact that you can use to get face time - use it.  If you can align yourself with the agency putting their TV commercials together, do it.  Any good business person is going to entertain the notion of partnering for a common purpose.  Don’t abuse it and you’ll be golden.

Step 4: Demonstrate your expertise

Once you get face time, make sure you show them that you’ve got what it takes to ‘ease their pain.’  That might mean a couple hours of free consulting.  Or it might be showing them how to use Twitter to gain followers.  The end result is usually that they contract you BECAUSE you know their business.  You’ve made it your personal priority to understand both them and their target market.

Step 5: Over deliver

The difference between someone referring you to their friends and partners is often based on how much you deliver over and above what was previously agreed upon.  It might be something easy like signing them up to an email newsletter which keeps them up to date on new trends or topics.  It could also be more difficult like weathering support issues.  Either way, it’s up to you to treat them like an honest to goodness partner.

Selling in this economy is harder than it ever has been.  If you approach your prospect as a partner rather than a client, I guarantee you’ll find rewards in the end.

The bottom line, make a decision and commit to an action plan.  If you do that, you’ll be wildly successful in business and in life.

So tell me, what has worked for you?

Slogans are a crucial part in any business or project.  In fact, the truly successful people in the world have ‘personal slogans’ that they use the weigh and measure every action they take.  These are people like Peter Drucker and Tony Robbins.

I’ve been digging pretty deep into slogans, taglines and offers for a while now.  Things like:

• How to create catchy slogans
• How to make taglines actionable
• How to elicit a positive response from only a single sentence
• How to use a slogan or a statement to guide my day to day business

So I decided to put together a webinar about what I found.  You see, having a successful slogan is as much phsychological as it is catchy.  There are cerain requirements that need to be met in order to work properly.

Here’s a short video I put together about Geico and how their slogan rocks:

To sign up for the webinar, enter your info below.  It’s free and will take place Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 3 PM EST (Noon PST)!

If you can’t attend but want access to the full video - sign up anyway. I’ll be making the recording available to all those that signed up after the show.

As Twitter adoption gets deeper and deeper, users are going to have more Twitter accounts to manage. A while back, I found Splitweet which does a good job of sorting out feeds from both my accounts - @jasondrohn and @axiium.

I wrote a post reviewing Splitweet over on Twitip.com and thought you might enjoy it so I’m posting the link below!

Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts

It would be awesome if you retweeted it too!

How many of you have multiple Twitter accounts?

One of the biggest, most colossal mistakes businesses make is their failure to monitor their marketing campaigns. How can you tell what’s working if there isn’t any proof? That fact alone makes it hard for me to understand why television commercials are so damn expensive - there aren’t any metrics!

Google Alerts provides a great, free service that will email you once a day to let you know what’s being said about your company, your products or your services. It’s also great for tracking and monitoring niches and trends that you might be interested in!

Let me know what you think… Have you used Alerts in the past?

Here’s the 7 tips we cover in the video:

• Have multiple presenters
• Make sure to record it!
• Conduct a post webinar survey
• Send follow up/thank you emails
• Make sure to send a reminder email
• Have good questions on the signup page (to give you a bit more info about your audience)
• Promote it with your email list.

If you can think of anything else, let me know!  I’ll add it here…

Over the past week, I’ve been getting a lot of emails and dm’s about holding another webinar on social media. Since I’ll be in teaching/training mode next week with UnlockingTwitter.com I’d thought I’d have it on Friday!

The date/time is Friday, May 15th at 11AM EST. The plan is to discuss Twitter as that’s what a lot of requests have been about.

Here’s some of the stuff I plan on covering:

• How to build your brand on Twitter
• The right way to promote products
• The best lead generation known to man
• The easy way to connect to bloggers and other heavy hitting Tweeters
• The single most important, lead generating element of Twitter

To get started, just fill in your name and email below!

If you can’t attend but want access to the full video - sign up anyway.  I’ll be making the recording available to all those that signed up after the show.

Here’s a quick excerpt of the last one!

Looking forward to seeing you in there!

This is a brilliant video on why groups or ’silos of interest’ will change the world.  It’s something I wholeheartedly believe..

In case you missed our webinar last week, we announced a new program - Unlocking Twitter.

Unlocking Twitter is a revolutionary training program that combines consulting (as in on the phone or through screen sharing, talking about a social media strategy suited for your needs) with online training. In just 8 weeks, you’ll be getting more leads and closing more deals than you have in the previous six months!

Here is the video announcing it:

If you’re interested in picking up new clients and selling more through Twitter, make sure you give this program a try. It’s completely risk-free and will be a lot of fun!

Hurry though. Registration ends May 18th and there are only 2 more spots left.. For more information and to sign up, head over to UnlockingTwitter.com

A lot of people think that social media marketing stops at your immediate followers and fans. In reality, that is really where it starts!

Check out the video as we explore something called your second tier of influence. And register for our free webinar tomorrow afternoon!

We’ve talked a lot about Twitter and Social Media Marketing over the past year.  To truly build an online brand, you need to become an expert.

Darren Rowse had an interesting tweet last Friday.  It was something to the effect of, “I wonder how many people on Twitter have Social Media Expert in their profile?”

The answer is far too many.

People, in thinking that it will get them more leads or more money or more followers, will quickly add the word ‘expert’ to their online identities.  They feel it makes them more valuable to the community and it reinforces their own self worth.

Expert status is something that’s earned though, not given.  Self proclaimed experts are just that - self proclaimed.

Think about it.  If I was to put a pool in my backyard and then tell all the neighbors I was an expert in pool installation, is it warranted?  Have I tackled every problem that has come up regarding pools?

Hell no.  I am simply someone that follows an instruction manual!

Establishing Expert Status

Two Christmas’es ago, I finally got an Xbox 360. Not that I have a tremendous amount of time to play, but when I get the chance I enjoy it immensely! Shortly after I unpacked the console, I took a trip to all the regular video game shops - Best Buy, Circuit City, Game Stop.  It’s been a while since I played anything with a controller, so this was all new to me.

My first stop was Best Buy. The number of games sitting on the shelf was unbelievable.  There were first person shooters, role playing games, action / fighting games and on and on.  I stared at the rack for close to 10 minutes trying to choose something, but nothing jumped off the shelf into my hand.

Next stop, Circuit City.  As soon as I walked over to the game section, a sales guy greeted me.  Normally, I don’t like to be helped when I’m shopping, but this was a different story.  I was hoping this guy had recommendations as to what the good games were.

He didn’t.  It wasn’t that he was clueless, but he was a car stereo guy filling in for a buddies shift. 

Strike Two.

Around the corner from Circuit City is Game Stop.  Immediately after walking in, I noticed this slightly overweight, pierced, tatoo’ed god of a gamer.  He was busy unpacking boxes, so I started looking through the shelves and checking out the backs of cases. 

When he finally walked over he said, “Don’t buy that.  It sucks.  You’ll be back before the end of the day…”

“I gave him a quizzical look and thought, that’s not how it’s done!  Your supposed to be selling me stuff!”

He went on to show me three great games, of which I bought all three.  He also recommended a game that was coming out, so I put it on reserve.

After that simple exchange, I knew that I’d found my new favorite video game store.  And it was all because of the clerk!  He was a gaming expert and wasn’t afraid to stop you from buying something that sucked.  For that, he’ll get my business for however long he’s in the store.

People’s Opinion Of You Matters

In social media, it doesn’t matter what you think of yourself.  People can’t be fooled.  You either are an expert or your not - there isn’t any in between.  If you find that people are unfollowing you faster than you can send a retweet, something’s wrong.

If you are an expert though, that fact will shine through every time.

The trick is to be genuine.  To feel truly connected to who is on the other side of the tweet.  To respect them as people do in day to day conversations.

Social media isn’t a one way promotional engine that lacks credibility.  It’s a conversation where expert status is given and taken away every day.