At our Pure Bookkeeping planning week in Bali held in 2015, Pete’s wife Trish was there with their gorgeous daughter Scarlett. She’s about 16 months old and although I was dying to take her from Pete and shower her with love, I knew that I couldn’t rush her. I had to be patient and win her over.
I said to Pete, “Give me a day and she’ll be fine”. What was interesting is that it took much longer than I anticipated. In fact, it actually took a week! Slowly but surely she came around. My song for her for the week was “Incy, Wincy Spider” which I performed with all the necessary actions. Big arms stretched out as the rain was falling down and the sun coming out. To my delight, the day before we left, as I was singing that song for the umpteenth time, Scarlet started to mimic the actions with her little arms stretched out as far as she could. She laughed each time the song finished and stood there in anticipation with her fingers ready for the start of the next song.
What a joy! My patience paid off.
I began to see an analogy in this story with marketing your bookkeeping business.
Perhaps you’ve just started out or perhaps you’ve been in business for a while but you haven’t done any consistent marketing and you’ve noticed a few clients have dropped off. You need clients NOW! You’re desperate! You’ve got bills to pay! The thing about marketing though is that each strategy you implement is like sowing seeds. They take time to germinate. For example, if you join a networking group the other members will want to receive more information about you before they refer clients.
You have to spend time building trust.
Prospects can smell desperation a mile away and they will be wary. The trick to being calm and confident when you’re marketing is to do lots of it all the time and allow the process to happen without forcing it.
Just like I did with beautiful Scarlett!
