Nurture Your Relationships
How do you handle prospects and leads? Do you send countless cold emails in the DMs with a tailored-yet-generic template that rarely gets a response? Do you do anything but make cold calls to complete strangers to ask them if they could use your services? Do you put off calling clients about more work because you hate selling your services, and would rather be making, creating, or designing instead?
What if I told you there is a different way? A way that nurtured you and your authentic self as well as your current and potential clients.
What if you only worked with people that know, like, and trust you because you’ve already proven that you are there to serve them and their needs first, not the sale? (Remember, we are in a service-based business. We're here to serve others and their needs. Not to yell at them about how awesome we are in a sea of noise, misinformation, spam, and scammers.)
Let's flip the script and talk about you and your needs. It's not all about our customers. We have to nurture ourselves too. What if you only worked with people you know, like, and trust? In case you didn't know, we are interviewing clients as much as they are interviewing us when we have discovery and sales calls. It's in your best interests to be checking in with how things feel and are going as you interact with prospects and clients.
I hear from clients constantly about current clients that don't feel good to work with and take advantage of them and their abilities. I also hear about the cold outreach attempts and how soul-sucking it is. Ick! That's not creative, imaginative, or fun. I don't know about you but it generally doesn't bear any worthy fruit either. I've tried it myself. It felt gross and boring!
I get SO many template emails in my inbox, LinkedIn and Instagram DMs, and SMS messages. It's hard enough keeping up with the emails and messages I do want. Think about how you want to be treated. Think about what experiences you like when engaging with vendors or your favorite brands. Then put yourself in your customer's shoes. Visualize where they are at and the challenges they are facing. Think about the experience you want to provide for your customers that supports them and their needs first.
Have you ever heard of the Cold-Warm-Hot Method? It’s a method where you focus on connecting with people and helping them with their REAL challenges and needs first, not trying to pitch them.
As creatives, we don’t like to be salespeople. As creative business owners, we have to be. We want to create and do what we love. We want to work with people that appreciate what we offer. We want to create and design things that speak to people and make an impact on the world.
So many creatives are also introverts and can’t stand having to sell themselves and their services. Tack on cold calling and emailing and it’s a recipe for disaster.
With the Cold-Warm-Hot Method, you focus on inviting people to connect and then creating a powerful experience for them that is solely focused on them and their challenges. It’s built on asking the tough questions other people aren’t so you get to the heart of what they really need, not what they think they need. Be playfully curious ask you ask questions. Ask them to play! It lowers the tension between you and allows for a more creative, productive conversation without assumptions and judgments.
The focus is on engaging and interacting with people you’d love to work with. The goal is to steadily shift prospects from cold to warm and then to hot as you nurture the relationship and solve their needs intentionally.
You can also apply this to people you know by jumping right in with warm and hot connections. Start reaching out to hot connections today! Those are friends, loved ones, peers, and colleagues that you've known for years. Nurture warm connections and shift them to hot. Warm connections are acquaintances, like the people you might see in your social media feeds or occasionally see out in public.
You don’t have to start with cold connections. Use your network! Reach out to people you would love to work with now. Go through your contacts and connections. If you see someone's name and it sparks joy, reach out to them and see how they are doing. Invite them to a call or video chat to catch up and share what each of you is up to. See what challenges or problems they are facing in their business or work. You never know who that next great client could be!
Be sure to do an audit on your existing clients. My coaching clients constantly share stories about shitty clients that don’t pay well or pay late. They keep adding scope creep to projects after signing the SOW and blame it on others in the company or low budgets. They don’t trust in the person’s abilities to the fullest and treat them like an order taker or an employee even though they're not. Who wants to work that way when running your own creative business? Not me! I’ve been there and done that. No thanks.
What if you had a tool that helped you keep track of your connections and the stage they are in as you nurture from prospect to great client? What if you had a tool to track your current client outreach so you know how long it's been since your last project or correspondence? What if you could track your outreach and sales and see projections of how you're doing throughout the year and what's working or not?
Well, I’ve created a Client Relationship Tracker to do just that. You are welcome to make a copy of the Google Sheet to keep track of your connections each week as you take them on their journey from cold to warm to hot, your outreach, and sales. This tracker tool will keep you accountable for your own success as you build a thriving, purposeful creative business.
Good luck and let me know if you need any help along the way! You can also join my 8-Week Course, if you'd like to gain more clarity, alignment, and focus for your creative business in 2023!
