Business Growth Accelerator

165 | How to continuously provide value to your clients and prospects (Part II)

December 12, 2022 Isar Meitis Season 2 Episode 165
Business Growth Accelerator
165 | How to continuously provide value to your clients and prospects (Part II)
Show Notes Transcript

A deep understanding of your prospects' needs and the core problems they are experiencing is key to running a successful business.
In the previous episode (part I), we covered how to identify the value your clients and prospects are seeking. 

In this episode (part II) we will dive into how to provide value to your clients and prospects on an ongoing basis, without breaking the bank or overwhelming your team.

90% of your addressable market is NOT "in market" right now. This means that if you are investing most of your marketing activities in people who are "in market" (capturing demand) you are missing out on the future 90% (generating demand).

And the way to generate demand in order to have an unfair advantage over your competition in the future is to provide value to the 90% right now, so they start identifying you as the ultimate expert in your field and the go-to solution in the future. 

But how do you do that? this is exactly what we will cover in this episode. here are a few examples:

πŸ’₯ Direct and indirect ways to provide value to prospects ad clients
πŸ’₯ What is the best way to do that (SPOILER ALERT: a live virtual event on a regular cadence)
πŸ’₯ What is co-creation of value, why it is important, and how can create it?
πŸ’₯ What are the benefits of having your own show?
πŸ’₯ how to have a show that drives business results with limited resources




Hi, It's Isar the host of the Business Growth Accelerator Podcast
I am passionate about growing businesses and helping CEOs, business leaders, and entrepreneurs become more successful. I am also passionate about relationship building, community creation for businesses, and value creation through content.
I would love it if you connect with me on LinkedIn. Drop me a DM, and LMK you listened to the podcast, what you think and what topics you would like me to cover πŸ™

Zoom recording:

Hello and welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator. This is Isar Meitis your host. And this is a part two of an episode that is diving into the topic of how to lead with value to your customers and prospects in order to gain their atention, build trust, and have more business with less effort. So in part one of this episode that I highly recommend you go back to, which is the previous episode, we talked about how to find what is that value that your customers are looking for? And in this episode we're gonna dive into the how to provide that value. Quick recap into sentences. The idea is to find what the real pain point is. Dive into the understanding of what the core problem that they're facing, not necessarily what they're looking for, because they may be tinted with the way they view the world because of the way how they see it, but the core, the core problem behind it. And then understanding what is the gap between the real problem and the solutions they have access to right now. That is the value that they're looking for. So how do you provide that value? So the first thing that comes to mind to most people, Our product or service. This is why we're in business. We We wanna solve that problem and provide that value, and hence make more money. I agree. That's a great approach. If you can tailor your product or service exactly to the needs of your client, then you should. The problem with that is about 90% of your potential clients are not in market right now, and only 10% are. So if you are okay. Competing over just 10% off the potential pie, then you got a good enough solution. But if you wanna look on the broader term, if you wanna address the 100% your potential client, and you wanna be able to build trust, build relationship, understand the needs better than anybody else, so in the long run, you can have more clients because they will know you before they're in market. Then keep on listening to this episode. So how can you provide value to your potential clients by understanding the real needs and gaps that they have without giving them a product or a service? There are multiple ways on how you can do that. First one is education. These people either do not exactly understand what the core problem is, or they understand the problem and they don't know that there's a solution or they understand the problem they know of a solution, but not a better solution that's out there. In all these cases, educational content that focuses on exactly these things can be valuable to them. And because now you'll be the expert giving it to them in the long run, valuable to you as well. The other thing that it does is it helps you make them see the world through your lens. And if you do this stride and you do this over time and you truly provide value, you're not trying to sell anything. Over time, you will become a category of one because these people will see you as the owner of the solution, versus there is a solution, let's now go shop for that solution. So education is number one. Number two, which is, I would call it a similar approach, is inspiration. In many cases, people just need a push in order to make the next step, in order to make the next purchase, in order to take their company to the next level. If you give them that inspiration that the thing they're seeking is within actual reach and you can plot the path that can lead them into the thing that in their dreams they want or that they've planned to do sometime in the future, you can help them understand that they can do this now with the resources they have, and again, because you're the one helping them in plotting that path, you will become most likely the solution provider for them. Next on the list of ways to provide value without actually selling anything is introductions. So if somebody's in your rough niche or your rough industry and they're looking for solutions and if you know of somebody else that can solve that particular problem they have right now to them and make the introduction, you will gain two things. A) You will gain two people. The two people you introduced. Feel that you have provided value to them. They will also feel that they want to help you back. So the next time an opportunity comes up, you are very likely to get a call from them. And especially when they understand this is genuine meaning, here's what I do. This is not perfect for where you are right now, but this other person, she has a great solution for you. I wanna make an introduction when you are in the market for the other thing, or when you grow out of this, or when you need complimentary solution or whatever the scenario. Please come and talk to me. I will gladly help you out. This totally paints you as a genuine value giving business person versus somebody who's just looking for a sale. And again, in the long run, that will pay off. The last thing is tools. If you're aware of tools that these people can use with their current problem that you can give them in order to help them solve their problems, do that. You're not competing with these tools. The fact that they have a tool to do some of what you're doing. Doesn't mean that what you're doing is a good fit, and if you can help them solve the problem, again, you become the problem solver for that person or company. Hence, top of mind provided value, more chances of doing business with you in the future. You can do all these things, meaning education, introductions, tools, inspirations in many different ways. So let's start talking a little bit about the. How can you provide education? How can you do introductions? How can you inspire people that in many cases you don't even know? Meaning they're the 90% who are not in market, meaning they haven't even been searching, they haven't been on your website. There's no cookies to track, there's no remarketing or retargeting to do. They're not in your email list. How do you do that? So it falls into two very big categories in. Indirect, and direct. I'll start with the indirect. On the indirect side, you can provide education and inspiration and introduce people to different tools and even people and solutions by writing a book, right? If you write a book about these topics and people find a book and recommend the book and read the book and recommend it to other people that it's relevant to them, you will never meet the people who read the book. You may didn't know they. They now get value from you. Another way to indirectly provide value to those people. A long education inspiration, introduction, tools, and so on, is having a podcast like this one. So if you're consuming this content right now, I obviously don't know who you are. You may or may not know me in person, but hopefully you're getting value by listening to this podcast. So that's another great way to do that. The benefit of a podcast over a book is that it's much more iterative and he updated to whatever the current trend needs, changes in the industry, changes in the marketplace, changes in the economy. If you record a podcast, you can keep on upgrading very, very quickly. While if you wanna do a new addition of your book, you will usually wait a few good years before you do that. So that's the benefit of a podcast. The other benefit of a podcast is that it gives you access to a lot of other experts that can help you educate and inspire and provide benefits and value to your target audience. You can co-author a book, but then you would usually have one or two co-authors in a podcast. You can host a different person every single episode, which could be once a week, twice a week, once a month, whatever frequency you want. Either way, it's a much higher frequency than you will have in a book that you gotta write. So these are indirect ways to provide value to the people. We'll talk in a minute about the, what value, what are you gonna talk about, how are you gonna find out? And so on. But let's first dive into the direct, what direct ways you can give value to your target audience. So number one is going live in different platforms. You can go live today on every social platform. So between YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, each and every one of them gives you the opportunity to go live. And if you use platforms like Stream Yard or Restream or any one of those platforms, you can go live in all of them at the same time with a very simple setup that literally anybody can do. The benefit of going live is that relevant people that are seeking for the value you're providing can communicate with you directly. Meaning they can ask you questions, they can engage with you, they can engage with other people on the call and enhance the level of value that is provided. The other thing that it does, it allows you to build relationships because it's now not a one way street where you wrote a book and people are reading it, or you published a podcast and people are listening to it. You're actually communicating with the people who are your potential clients, they're your prospects, they're existing clients, and so on. And you can start building that community, that ecosystem around you of people who are interested in the value that you are providing. Another way to do this, which is less scalable, but works extremely well, is speaking at events. And this could be live events, they could be virtual events. There are pros and cons to speaking at events. The cons is that they don't come that often, right? So if you're looking for specific industry events, they don't happen all the time. They would be one every quarter or every six months, or sometimes just once a year. And there's gonna be a lot of people who want to speak at the event, so you're not always gonna get the chance. The benefits of speaking at events, is the fact that it's in the eyes of the people who are listening to. Elevates your level of authority just by the fact you are on stage with other people that are considered experts in your particular industry. So if you are sharing the stage with those people, now you're guilty by association with those people. And everybody assumes you're as smart, as important, as valuable as the other people on stage. So speaking on stages, speaking in conferences and events has a huge benefit and is definitely worth investing in finding which events are happening in your. Thinking of how you can provide value in those events and applying to speak in those events. And again, this is more of a face-to-face. There's people in the audience, there's gonna be a q and a. People after that are, can come and talk to you in the event itself. So it becomes another opportunity to build relationships in addition to just providing value. Now the cool thing is there is a way to combine these two things. You can combine the concept of events with the concept of a podcast. And that's by creating your own recurring events. So if you host your community, your audience on regular cadence and keep on bringing other experts to be quote unquote on stage with you in a virtual environment, you enjoy the best of all worlds. The events are happening all the time. You don't have to wait for next quarter or next year in order to speak at the event. The fact you're bringing other experts put you on stage with them and you're guilty by association, which elevates the level of trust and authority that you're. And you own the event, and hence, you can define the exact topics, you can define the conversation. You can lead the conversation with the people in the audience in order to drive whatever results you wish to drive. So you're really enjoying all those benefits with a relatively small effort. before we dive into the effort, and that's gonna be our next topic, because I assume a few people saying, oh, that sounds awesome, but I don't have time, I don't have the tools, I don't have the resources, I don't have the team. We will get to that later on. But for now, I wanna talk about what are the benefits of running your on ongoing live talk show or podcast or event, call it, whatever you wanna call it, on a regular cadence. The first and most important thing is you get to communicate with your prospects and clients on regular basis, which means you will get to better understand their needs, which means by definition you will win. Because understanding the actual needs, the gaps that your clients and prospects have allow you to customize to tailor your product, your services, your messaging. You will have the ultimate feedback machine in order to be able to perform better, provide more value in a shorter amount of time compared to anybody else in your niche, in your industry, and hence, you're gonna beat that competition. Another great benefit is by having. These people live with you and allowing them to ask questions, you get two extra bonuses. One is, you know what the next topics that you need to talk about are, because people are asking a question. If 10 people ask similar questions, you know that these are topics that people are struggling with, and it gives you a bad signal of how you can provide value to them. The other thing is it helps a lot with content distribution afterwards because if you have a guest asking a question and you produce the question and the answer as a separate piece of content and tag that person, they are going to share it. The assumption is, and it's a fair assumption, that if they're interested in this topic, other people they know are interested in the same thing. Meaning you will get free distribution to content that provides value to people that you don't know, but you know them through the people who has been on your show. So by having people live asking questions, you get all these benefit. The next thing. It enables you to build a network when I do this podcast. Yes. A lot of people are listening and it's awesome and I really appreciate that you're listening and I really appreciate every now and then somebody writes back to me and. I really enjoyed this episode. It really helped me in this, helped me in that. I love this. I love that. It's amazing feedback and I enjoy doing this, but it doesn't happen a lot. If you do this live. You are actually networking. You're building trust with people that can see your face, that can communicate with you, and you're starting to build relationships and you're starting to build trust and you're starting to build. A community of people because there are going to be the regulars who will come back again and again and again.

Zoom recording-1:

Once you start reading these regular events ongoing, and if you're conscious about it, you can start forming a community versus just an audience. So what I mean by conscious. And what I mean by a community and not an audience. Let's start with the latter. A community is very different than an audience. An audience is more of a top down, like a pyramid. Where you speak and people listen and consume the content, but they're not really engaging with you and they're definitely not engaging with each other and they're not providing value to one another. In a community, people know each other and create value beyond the top down value, and hence, it becomes a lot more valuable to each and every one of the members of the community. In addition, in a community, People feel a part of the journey and hence, they're a lot more engaged and a lot more likely to participate and help the community grow, which means everybody benefits, including you, the person that creates their community. so what do I mean by being conscious about it? Having people in the audience will not make them into a community unless you take specific steps. So what steps can you take while you're running events in order to create a community? You can start having. Different rituals that become a fun thing that only the community knows. You can start having nicknames for people. You need to start calling people by first name. You need to welcome them to the show. You need to make introductions between people when it's relevant. You need to allow people from the community to give answers instead of you, and you can do this while you're running the show. Again, if you're conscious about it and you're aware that this is the outcome you're trying to achieve. The benefits are immense of having a community and not just an audience because people will feel a part of you and your company's journey, and they'll be committed to helping you be more successful. You will get clients through that. You will get referrals through that. You will get feedback through that, and it's not gonna cost you anything extra. So it's definitely worth doing. Before I dive into some additional benefits of doing this process, I wanna talk about something that a lot of people miss in this thing, and a lot of people are investing a lot of time in one-to-one relationship building, which I get it. You know, this could be in the shape of hosting people as their guest, or a podcast. It could be a business meeting, it could be. Lunch or dinner with the right people. It is critical. It has that intimacy. It builds trust and it's a very important part of business and relationship building. Also, a lot of people focus on the one to many. What does that mean? They produce content, they put it on LinkedIn, they write books. They do a lot of stuff that caters to a large group of people that they don't really have a real relationship with, but they're aware of that person and the value that they bring. It's also important. Most people miss the one to few instead of one to one and one too many. Kind of like the layer in the middle. And the one to few is where the magic really happens because the one to few hosting an event that has five people, 10 people online or in person has the benefits of both worlds, meaning on one hand it's intimate enough, you can know people by first name. You can have these rituals. You can really build trust and relationship with the people. But from a time perspective, You're investing one hour of your time to build relationship and trust with five people, 10 people, 20 people, and not just one person, while those people still feel like they got an hour of your time. So that mid layer is where a lot of the magic happens and a lot of businesses and individuals who are trying to do this miss on this opportunity. So what are the benefits of all these things, of growing a community, of having a show first and foremost. You build relationships, you build trust, and you become an authority in the eyes of your prospects and existing clients, which will dramatically reduce your cost of acquisition and increase lifetime value because people stay with you longer, buy more stuff because they trust you. So from a pure business ROI the ROI is there more clients for less money for a longer period of time, paying you for more services or more products. It's a no brainer. But there's also another byproduct, and the other byproduct is having amazing high value content that attracts more people into your community. And it's really that high value because you're co-creating it with your target audience. Meaning by allowing people to engage with you and ask questions and answer those questions, by definition, you're creating the content that is most interesting to these people that will allow you to. Provide the most amount of value because it's the actual people you're trying to serve, asking questions, telling you literally what their issues are, what gaps they're seeing, and allowing you to establish yourself as an expert. The other benefit of that, as I mentioned, is those people, because you're co-creating the content with them, they literally appear in the content, in video, in audio, in written text. They will share that content. So if you. An asking you a question and you answer her very well, and you produce that piece of content and you tag her while you're doing this. She will share the content with her friends. And it's very likely because it's relevant to her, that will be relevant to them as well. Another amazing byproduct of a process of having your own shows on a regular cadence, recording it together with a live. Is the fact that you're co-creating value with that audience, and that means you are creating content that by definition is valuable to the people because they are practically asking you questions, telling you what the gaps are, what they're struggling with, what their needs are, allowing you to establish yourself further as an expert, that co-creation of value. Does two things. One, it enables you to establish relationships because every relationship in the world, whatever kind of relationship, business relationship, personal, romantic relationships are built around co-creation of value. So it allows you to establish the relationship with those people, but also. It by definition makes the content highly relevant and highly valuable to those people, and it makes it very likely that they will share the content. Because if somebody from the audience asks you a question they care about and that they know other people that care about this because it's people from their ecosystem, and you provide them a great answer, either yourself or with the help of the expert at you're hosting and you create a piece of content just out of that, that question and the answer that you've provided and you tag him or. The person from the audience, she or he are very likely to share that piece of content because it's showing them, it's highlighting them, it's a question that they cared about and that you cared enough in order to create video or an audio out of that so you get organic reach that you otherwise wouldn't get just by co-creating the value together with people from your ecosystem. Hopefully by now you're convinced that this is beneficial to your business. Maybe you are convinced before this episode and not just give you a final push. If that's the case, amazing. I know a lot of people who struggle with, I cannot afford this, or I don't have time for this, or This is gonna overwhelm me and my team, and the reality is that's not true. So let's diffuse this bomb for a second. First of all, let's talk about the time that it requires, because if you're a busy ceo, that's usually your biggest problem. If you're just getting started and you just wanna run a show every other week, all you need is about two hours every other week. So that's four hours a month in order to gain all these amazing benefits that we talked about before. Building an audience, building a community, knowing the exact problems and the language that your customer is using, refining your message, refining your service, refining your product, all of these things in just four hours a month is a no brainer. The other aspect of this is, can I afford this? Now I need people to find guests and I need to onboard the guests, and I need to produce content, and I need to run a show, and I need to distribute the content, and my marketing team is already sliced in, or I don't even have a marketing team. I'm doing that on my own. Yes, it sounds like a big problem, but the reality is, It isn't, and it's not a big problem because there are companies out there who provide it as a service. Meaning you can hire somebody and they will charge you a relatively small amount of money and can do these things for you once you figured it out, once you start seeing the traction, once it starts generating business for you, then you can start hiring people. In the US you can hire people overseas in places like the Philippines that have amazing employees, smart, talented, experienced or significantly less money than you would pay similar people in the us. So even then, there's an easy way to grow in house while not breaking the bank. So how do you know you're getting traction and it's time to move to the next step and increase the volume or increase the frequency or higher own team? You will know that once you start seeing people coming back again and again to your events, people from those events becoming clients, people from those events becoming referral sources, and you're seeing hard dollars and not just intent as a return to your effort. A great way to know that people came through, either being guests on events or participating in the events is in your intake form of people who want to do business with you. Literally have a field, an open field, open text that says, how did you hear about us? And make it mandatory. And then people will tell you, I've listened to your podcast. I've seen your post on LinkedIn for the last six months I've participated in six or. These will give you the exact signals that clients that you're getting, people that pay you money to your business, for your services, or for your product are finding out about you and building trust with you through this mechanism. If you wanna learn more about this topic, I would gladly share with you if it's something you wanna do for your business, please find me on LinkedIn. Isar Meitis, I S A R M E I T I S. Again, I need to spell that name every time and pronounce that name every time, but the benefit is there's only one of me on LinkedIn, which is awesome. I need to thank my parents for that. But if you really wanna understand more about this, if something you're curious about and wanna figure out if you can do it in your business. Please connect with me, let me know, and I will gladly jump on a call with you and give you all the tips in the world in much more detail than I was able to do in these two episodes. And quick summary of these two episodes. Providing value to your target audience is the ultimate way to grow a business, especially a B2B business. Finding the value comes through, understanding their real problems, the real gaps that they have between what they have right now and the solutions that they're seeking. If you can do that, you have a real business, but you gotta remember that 90% of the people are not in market right now for the solution, the service, or the product that you're selling. Hence, if you can educate them, inspire. Give them introductions to people who can help them in their current stage, in their journey and educate them through your lens. They are most likely to choose you as the solution provider when the time comes. Hence, you are creating demand and not just capturing demand out of the 10% that most of your competition are competing for. That's it on value creation and leading with value. And until next time, have an amazing.