Panel

C. J. Hayden (twitter getclientsnow.com)
Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Summer Camp)
Eric Davis (twitter github blog)
Evan Light (twitter github blog)
Jeff Schoolcraft (twitter github blog)

Discussion

Following Up
Keeping the Pipeline Full
Use the book as a coach.
Work with the book.
Advantages of one-on-one coaching.
Benevolent Peer Pressure
Getting Things Done by David Allen
Socratic Questioning
Evoking Interest > Telling What to Do
How do you find a coach?
Not all coaches are a good fit.
Many Tactics, 6 Strategies

Direct Contact and Followup
 Networking and Referral Building
 Public Speaking
 Writing and Publicity
 Promotional Events
 Advertising
 Effective self promotion comes from a place of passion.
 Scale, to prevent burnout.
 Getting Referral Sources
 Using CRM Effectively
 Referring people to articles/blog posts

Picks

Marketing Monday (Eric)
The Busy Trap (Evan)
TweetBot (Evan)
Yahoo Voice Hacked - Change Your Passwords (Jeff)
Twitter Bootstrap (Jeff)
Ultra Mega Job Board List (Jeff)
Motor Oil (Chuck)
Rapportive (Chuck)
Why You Don't Market The Way You Should (C. J.)
In Marketing, One Size Does Not Fit All (C. J.)

 

Hey everybody, and welcome to episode 20 of the Ruby Freelancers Show. This week on our podcast, we have Eric Davis.

Hello.

We also have Jeff Schoolcraft.

What's up.

We have Evan Light.

I'm back.

And we have a special guest, and that’s CJ Hayden, because this week is our Book Club where we're talking about Get Clients Now. Welcome, CJ.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

So do you wanna introduce yourself? Maybe give us a little bit of background about you before we get going?

Sure. Get Clients Now is my baby. It's been around since 1995, which is a good long track record for anything in this world, I think. And Get Clients Now is a 28-day marketing and sales program for independent professionals. So I designed the program, I wrote the book, and I coach people in the Get Clients Now system, and I also train facilitators to lead the Get Clients Now system, and bring other people through it as a program or one on one coaching.

Awesome. So do you do coaching in addition to having the book out there?

Yes, I do.

That would be really cool to go through, I think. Anyway, we're talking about the book and the book was just really, really interesting. It was funny because these guys told me to read it a while ago and so I read it and I was like, “Ok, I kind of know what to do.” And then I read it the second time and I started working through the worksheets and stuff and I'm sitting here going, “Why didn’t I do this the first time?”

I think it goes like this: I got in this group about 3 years ago. Eric and Jeff both mentioned to me that I should read this book, and I mentioned this book to every single freelancer who I've met, or every single person I met who are interested in becoming a freelancer – Chuck being one of them.

I love to hear that.

It's a great book. Of all the business books I've read, it's made the most impact on my business.

Wow, thank you for that. And Chuck, I love what you said about you read it and you thought, “Well, that’s nice.” But then you actually did the worksheets and said, “Hey, this is pretty cool. This thing works!”

Yeah. Well, it kind of punched me in the jaw and said, “Hey, look. You are having problems in your sales process right there. And here’s how to fix it.” And that’s what I really liked about it was it really kind of shined the light on there. I'm terrible, terrible at following up with people. And I'm like, “Oh, that would probably be a good thing to get good at.” [Chuckles] Anyway, so yeah, I've been working through the worksheet and I'm going to start my 28 days tomorrow and we'll get running.

Fabulous. And you said something really important which is that, you notice that follow up is something that you are not so great at, and that's why I put follow up in the center of universal marketing cycle. That’s the first diagnostic tool in the Get Clients Now system is because it's so easy to forget about that, but it needs to be front and centered; it needs to be visible to us all the time.

Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is that you put in there, you have a whole bunch of different questions. If you answer ‘yes’ to these questions, you probably need to focus on getting leads or filing the pipeline, I guess it is. “And if you answered yes to these questions, then you focus on following up. And if you answered yes to these questions, you need to focus on presentations.” And then the last one is closing the sales. And it really just highlights… a lot of books use that approach, and in a lot of cases, it works really well because you are reading that and it really kind of gets your attention; you are going, “Ok, I'm answering yes to all of these questions.”

And I think that’s exactly what I want people to do is use the book as a coach. Let it ask them questions and have the questions evoke realizations about what you should be focusing on and where your efforts should be going. If you just read it and absorb information, that’s great. A lot of folks just do that, they tell you information, but then where is the action step? I think that in order for there to be change in what you do, there needs to be a change in your awareness; you need to realize something that would go, oh, because that’s what really causes you to change the way you do things.

But half the people I recommended this book to, they instantly pushed back or they push back either violently or passive aggressively and they say, “Yeah, but what am I really going to get out of it?” And I try to put it in terms of, “It's not a book that tells you what to do; it's a book that gives you the materials you need and it help you form a plan. And the plan is unique to you do. So it's going to work; you just have to work with the book.”

And when I put it to them that way, they tend to get on board with it. And that’s why I found the book to be so great, is that you had enough different suggestions in there for different forms of marketing and then you prioritize them in terms of effectiveness that it became very clear to me what would work for me out of that book -- and it has been working.

Well that’s a great description, Evan, of what's different about it from other approaches to marketing is that it is customized, and you don’t need to be a marketing expert to customize it for yourself. I designed the book as a cookbook with that kind of methodology so that you could literally use it as the way we do cookbooks: “I don’t know how to cook; tell me how to do it.” And you can pick something from the list; you can use a recipe and you can put it together in a way that really works for you.

Yeah, that makes sense. So I have to ask, is your coaching approach very much different from what you get out of the book?

Yes and no. So, I do two kinds of coaching: I coach people on how to get clients and when we are doing that how to get clients work, absolutely, I use all the Get Clients Now tools because there it is, and they are good tools so people should use them. And it's one of the reasons that people first come to me for coaching. So that’s the yes part.

The no part is that really what's behind you doing or not doing what you already know you should probably do, is a whole bunch of other stuff, and that’s where one on one coaching is really good for is uncovering, what is that stuff? Why for example, do you hang out on Facebook all day when you already know probably its worth about 20 minutes of your time and you should be spending the rest of your marketing time doing something else. What's that about? And that’s where one on one coaching can really get you.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I was hoping we get to this because coaching has been… everybody, it seems like in a the last year, so everybody is talking about getting coached. So I have two questions about the subject and one was why do I need a coach or why would you suggest people get a coach. And then, I guess turn around to you, CJ, do you have a coach yourself, or just…

Good question. Yeah, right now I do not have a coach myself. And I have had a coach for myself many times in the past. And I think that’s what I would say to the question should somebody have a coach? Sometimes. I think so. I think having a coach at times when you are wanting to change something significant about the way that you are doing things, when you’re wanting to learn something new about how you operate, I think that’s one of the things that coaching is really good for, or when you have a big project.

I've had a coach at times in the past where I've been for example working on a book because that’s one of the things that I really need help with finding room to fit in to my life. I've written four books now and every time I do it, it's like, “Eh! Was I crazy to think I was going to fit in here somehow?” So I need help with having somebody else, not just hold me accountable, but help me see, “Ok, you wanna be working on the book. You said you did, so why aren’t you? What’s getting in the way here?” And really have that person who is going to give me that benevolent peer pressure, right? To say, “So what's going on? You said you wanted this and yet it's not happening. What's in the way? How can we fix that? How can we make you do things differently so that you get what you want?” So that’s what coaching is really good for.

At times when you’re sort of coasting along status quo? No. No real need to have a coach. At times when things are going really great for you, maybe there's no real need to have a coach either. But when you want to make changes, when you wanna take on something new and different, when you want to start something, I think those are all times having a coach could be really helpful.

Interesting points there, because a lot of them to me sound reminiscent of another one of my favorite books that I've recommended almost everyone and Chuck has read recently, is David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

Yes.

Because he talks a lot in there about… I don’t remember if this is the exact term. I mean, I've read it twice I guess in the past few years. What's essentially like emotional inertia that if you find yourself having difficulty starting something, maybe you shouldn’t be starting it at all. And maybe you should just get it off your list. I mean, that’s kind of a holistic approach I often take. Or if it's just something I really wanted to do and I'm not getting it done, then that’s a more interesting problem, though I don’t remember him addressing that one specifically.

And yeah, that is one of the techniques that I will use with the client when we've been struggling back and forth with they say they wanna do something and that thing still isn’t happening; one day I'll simply suggest, “All right, well, let’s just forget about it. Let’s cross it off the list.” And usually what happens as a result of that is a big reaction on their part. “Oh no, I can’t do that! I really do want it.” Aha, ok. Let’s find out if you really do want it. Why do you want it? What for? What's puling you towards it? What's making your say, “No, I don’t wanna let go of it.” And let’s look there for helping your find the motivation and the internal resources to actually make that happen for you.

So do you find that a lot of coaching, a lot of this advice is emotional intelligence related? Because that’s what I'm hearing, like it sounds almost like a combination of Buddhist mindfulness practice. And seriously though and just a certain amount of emotional intelligence in asking these incisive questions of them, and trying to get them to ask it themselves.

It depends a lot on coach and what that particular coach’s training and background and world view is. The basic skillset of coaching though is Socratic questioning. I ask you questions so that you realize what you already know. That's the core of what coaching is about. And yeah, sometimes coaches give advice, right? Like we'll say, “Well, have you considered making a schedule?” But the core of it, what makes it different than consulting or teaching or any other methodology that people used to help them is that it's based on the idea of the question as the separate tool.

I just wanna jump in here because I had a business coach for the first few months that I went freelance. I had actually hired him before I went freelance to help me get out on my own and start my own business and then I got laid off and it just kind of all happened. But yeah, that’s really what it is that… and I don’t know how deliberate it was with my coach, but effectively, he would ask questions that I wasn’t asking, and it wasn’t because I didn’t think to ask him, it was more because I didn’t really wanna face the reality of what the answer was. And he either saw through that or was just asking because he didn’t have the same blinders out that I did, and really got me to face what I was dealing with and then work my way around the problems that I was having.

And hopefully, that was part of what your coach’s training was because that’s what most of us learn. I mean, I came in to coaching from being a consultant and I was used to telling people what to do. And what I learned when I was trained as a coach was, “Oh, telling people what to do only goes so far. What you have to do is you have to evoke from that person the interest, the willingness, the resources, the creativity that is going to allow them to do things for themselves; and then either not need you anymore, or need you for something new, the next level the next layer of what they are going to get to.”

Interesting. I've experienced something like that in my own business. I act as a consultant in addition to just being a contractor. A lot of people pull me in because they know they need help, but they done necessarily want to get my advice. They think they want the help, but they don’t necessarily want the advice that goes with it. We're sort of halfway there and I need to try to figure out what it is that’s wrong, to try to get them to want to change because they know they want to change, but they don’t really feel it yet.

That is very perceptive, yeah. They don’t really feel it yet. Eric Jung said, “Advice is what you ask for when you already know the answer, but wish you didn’t.”

[Chuckles] That is so true. Yeah, you are hoping they'll give you a different answer, but that rarely works out, right?

Which is what, like the second stage of grief that’s bargaining?

You’ve already gone through denial; you hire a consultant, now you are bargaining.

[Chuckles] Oh, yeah.

Not trying to make this show totally about coaching, but I do have a follow up question: have do you find a coach? I mean, I have no idea. I can hire technical people because I'm a technical person, but I have no idea what to look for in a coach.

and how I would answer that is talk to people who you feel as if are in some way like you. It doesn’t necessarily to be people in your industry; maybe people who you feel like are at the same level that you are at in your business or people that you feel as if you have kind of an affinity with personally and say, “Have you ever had a coach?” Who do you work with? I think personal recommendations are absolutely the best way. If you can’t find anybody that you know who you would really feel as if could give you a good solid recommendation, there are a number of places that you can go online and look at directories of coaches and even put out an RFP for a coach.

So the international Coach Federation is one that’s coachfederation.org. Or if you already know that you want a coach who is using a particular kind of methodology, because maybe you heard about it and you thought that that was interesting. Most of the training schools maintain their own directories of coaches. So I went to the coaches’ training institute and thecoaches.com has their own directory of coaches who trained with them. And then I also received training form the Arbinger Institute and I'm a part of the Arbinger coaches network. And that’s another way to you can identify coaches.

One other thing that I kind of wanted to point out is that when I hired a coach, I heard a lot about him from different people and I actually started listening to his podcast, and so I started looking at what he was putting out there and kind of got a feel for what he was about, and how that kind of fit in with what I was at. And then I contacted him and he actually did a free half hour, which turned into a free hour, where we just talked about where I was at with things. And by the time I was at an hour, I was pretty comfortable with the way he approached things and the way that we communicate. And I understand that not all coaches work well for all people, and so it's ok if you get an hour or two into the coaching and you realize that this person isn’t good for you, then you can either say, “Look, this isn’t getting me what I want and I can either refer you to somebody else or they can work with you in the way that works for you.”

Absolutely. And not all coaches will give you a sample session at no charge, but all coaches will have a conversation with you about, “What are you looking for? This is how I coach. Let’s look and see if you and I feel as if a match,” before they ask you to enter into any kind of coaching relationship, because we wanna make sure too; we don’t wanna have people as clients who are people that are not going to benefit from our coaching. What fun is that?

Or even worse, be coached by you and not have a good experience then turn around and be a negative referral or something, not a classification, but if they are not going to give you good reviews for your coaching you are trying to provide them, then they are not going to be good for you.

That’s right.

So let’s get back to this process for finding clients. I thought it was interesting that you really boiled things down to six strategies. And you know, it's so funny because you think about all of the different ways you can promote your business, and you start listing them off and yeah, they all pretty much fall into one of the six categories.

And looking at it, no matter what new technological developments occur that starts to affect how marketing happens, the strategy still hold true. And there are many, many, many, many tactics for marketing; but the strategy boil down to six. I mean, anything you can do is either direct contact and follow up, networking and referral building, public speaking, writing in public, promotional events or advertising. That’s it. There's only six.

So everytime a new technological thing occurs, so Get Clients Now was designed pre-internet, right? So nobody was on the web when I came up with the program. It's a channel with which you can do any of those things; just like writing a letter is a channel that you can use for doing any of those things; just like being on the phone is something you can use; being online is a channel you can use; social media is a challenge you can use; and how you use it is what dictates how successful it is -- not the channel itself.

Now, you suggest when you start the program that you do no more than 3 or 4?

Yes.

Is there any point maybe later on that you maybe branch in to the 5th or 6th or whatever area after your 28 days?

If you are a one person business with no outside help, I find it almost impossible for anybody to use successfully more than 4 strategies simultaneously.

Ok.

Now, if you are a one person business and you have outside help, and you are acting as the manager, sure you can start using additional strategies. But for most people, I think what's more beneficial is swapping them out. “This month I'm really going to focus on speaking or this quarter, I'm really going to focus on speaking. The next month or the next quarter, I'm going to focus on writing.” And switch that focus so you have the intensity and the follow through on a particular area where you are trying to make changes, and then do it with a different area on another rather than to add it on to what you're already doing.

It's probably not just the time either. I mean, I certainly agree; I barely have enough time to do the marketing I want and I need to get a coach, I know. But the other part of it is people aren’t going to be good at all 6 strategies either. I mean, some people are not going to want to ever do public speaking, but they might be great at writing or something. So I don’t know. Is it likely that people are going to be good at all six strategies?

Very unlikely. And even if they are good at them, that may not mean that they are the best ones for them to be doing.

Right.

I find that for most independent professionals, there is really not a lot of use for advertising in any of its forms. And for many, there's really not a lot of use for promotional events. So if you strike out the things that are at the bottom of the effectiveness hierarchy, and you only do those things that are most effective, you are going to stick with the top 3 and 4 anyway.

So I have to ask this, and probably for obvious reasons, but is a podcast public speaking or writing in publicity?

Isn’t that a great question? [Chuckles] So it depends on how you use it, right? A podcast can be advertising. So it's one of those technological things; it's a channel, right? So, what are you using it for? So typically, a podcast is going to be public speaking. But there's a caveat; because if you are the one distributing your podcast, and the only way that anybody finds out about your podcast is because they come to your website, well, that’s not really public speaking because you don’t have the endorsement, the credibility, the reach that you have when you speak for somebody else. So, it's really more in the publicity category because you are the one who’s pushing it out there and you are the one who’s saying, “Hey, aren’t I great? I have a podcast,” versus somebody else saying that.

Well, doesn’t it depend in a way? Because one thing that comes to mind, I tend to do most of my marketing by a way of public speaking. I mean, I can write, but I really enjoy talking with people a lot more than I enjoy writing. And so I end up mentioning this podcast in twitter feed. A lot of people or some of the people, who heard me speak is on my twitter feed, so a bunch of those people then come over to the podcast. And then Eric, and Jeff did the same thing or similar things. And I found that it seems to have multiplicative effect because I know some of my followers on twitter for example are listening to this podcast.

Absolutely, because what you are doing there is you are incorporating an element of follow up. So when you have somebody who already knows you, and who you are following up with by having repeat contacts with that person in a variety of media, now what you are doing is you are actually executing a follow up strategy which is way at the top of the effectiveness chain.

Interesting. I never put those together like that. That explain a little bit of why my approach isn’t working. [Laughs] Because a lot of the pieces of my approach, according to the way you have laid it out in the book, the medium effectiveness are down but it's been working really well. So I can say there's follow up in there. I just learned something, thank you.

And I've heard that from a couple of different people. I mean, there's a guy named Pat Flynn that he has like a ‘be everywhere’ principle. And the whole idea is that they get exposed to the podcast, and then they come and the read a couple of your blog posts, and then they follow you on Twitter.

And so you are continually in front of them, so that they know who you are and what you are about.

Well there was this one quote from the book that I'm looking at right now, when you say things like that, Chuck, we talked about it before, to me feels a little… not putting this on you because you are quoting someone else, but it feels a little bit artificial that it's a strategy or a tactic. The line on the book is quoting Debbie Allen, “Effective self-promotion comes from a different place – a place of caring from your heart. When done effectively, it comes out from a place of passion; a place of help and support first and foremost.” I tend to do the marketing so to speak, that I do because I'm talking about things that mattered to me, and I'm doing them in a context that matters to me. It's somewhat a part of a coherent strategy, but really it's just expressing feelings to people who seem to care about them.

Yeah, I think you are right there. I mean, if it's artificial, then people will see through it, and that doesn’t help you at all. But you know, if you can do it and you can be genuine doing it, then being in more places is helpful.

Totally.

It is helpful. And I’d like to point out that all of you who are here having this conversation with me today are advanced entrepreneurs, in that you’ve already gotten it together enough to have a podcast, right? So your typical independent professional who hung out their shingles six months ago, right? They look at this as being, “Oh my god, you mean I'm supposed to get clients and serve clients, and simultaneously write a blog, have a podcast, do public speaking, go to networking events, have social media network?” And they just throw their hands up and say, “I might as well get a job.”

And see your kids before you go to bed. [Laughter]

Oh yeah, have a life.

The follow up to the podcast, I forgot who said it, but it has something to invite someone to, but it's the same idea, right? If they see you speak, come to you. Was it Michael Port?

Yeah.

And its good advice and you know I wrote an article a while back called, ‘Why you shouldn't do what the gurus do.’ And it’s really looking at this idea that we think that in order to be successful, we should pattern ourselves after the successful people we see out there who were the ‘be everywhere’ thing, right? Not recognizing that either those people have a staff who is executing a lot of the stuff for them, or those people who have been on business for a long time, and they felt it very slowly, very incrementally.

I've been in business for 20 years doing what I do. That’s a really long time. So, I've got articles, I've got a network, I've got speaking topics. When somebody says, “Can you do a guess blog post for me?” I don’t have to write it from scratch. I just pull something out of the hat, right? If somebody says, “Can you come talk on this topic?” I don’t have to write up a description; I already have that description. All the mechanics of the behind the scenes of what it takes to do that to ‘be everywhere’ thing, it takes a long time to put all of that together. And to most people starting out, it's very discouraging to think that they’ve got to do it all at once somehow in order to be successful.

That would explain the reaction I get from a lot of people when I recommend your book. [Chuckles]

Because they are afraid of starting one little tiny step on a journey of a million miles. It's really your book makes it such a simpler journey.

One thing I've done, because I've done the 28-day process probably a dozen times now, but I started it like exactly how the book says it. And overtime, I've actually refined it. And so, if I know it's going to be busy, I might only pick two strategies and only pick like fix or six daily actions instead of ten, just because I know myself if I put too much on my plate, and get overwhelmed, I just burn out and won’t get anything done. And so like right now, I'm in the middle of one that I only have six daily actions instead of ten, just so I know what's going on in my personal life and I'm not going to be able to get the time I need.

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s one of the customizable things about the programs is even though they have less actions, or you have actions that are scaled down to what's reasonable. There's a lot of examples in the book of things like, ‘go to one networking event every week’, or ‘send out ten letters a week,’ that sort of thing. But you can scale that to whatever makes sense to you. Go to one a month for example, or send three letters a week. The quantity is not what's important in terms of the successfulness; it's the persistence and the commitment that’s important to being able to see some sort of impact.

That’s one of my favorite ones, I think: ‘get ten no’s’ a week, or whatever.

Yeah, that’s another suggestion, is to look at it from that direction because a lot of people are afraid of getting a ‘no’, right? But getting ten no’s is going to lead you to a yes. Why not put it out there and say, “Ok, this is what I'm up to. I'm going to try and get ten no’s.” And therefore, you are going to do things that are otherwise you might hold back on.

I'll tell you, my kids don’t like getting no’s.

But yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The other thing is if you are getting a no that isn’t necessarily a never, and so you are still gathering an information that can help you make a sale down the line.

Yeah, and I think that too is a place that people need to be looking is instead of looking at, “How do I turn this into a sale today?” The questions is really: “How do I need to be of service to this person today, in such a way that they will either become a client or become referral source, or become a colleague and supporter; become part of my fan club?” And if you are looking at it through the lens of building relationships for the long term, then you are going to deliver to that person whatever is most valuable to them right now, today. And that’s eventually going to lead to benefit for you, even if it doesn’t turn into an immediate client. I think that’s where the focus really needs to be.

Glad to hear you say that, because I was thinking the same thing. [Laughs]

So let me ask a question then, and this is going to get a little bit more into kind of the practical knowledge, but I’d never been very good at turning people into referral sources. And I'm not sure if I'm just not approaching it correctly, or if there's something there. Because to me, a referral source in the past at least, has been somebody who just kind of organically somebody said something to him and they remember, “Oh gee, Chuck does that stuff.” And so I'll tell them to go talk to him. Is there more to that? Should I be following up with them? “Hey, do you know anyone who needs my help?” How do you exactly approach that?

There's a couple of things about that: one is people need to know who to refer to you, and when to refer them. And sometimes we're not so good at letting people know that. We think everybody knows what we do, and how we can help other people. And usually, they don’t; usually in fact, even people who are very close to us don’t know that. So we need to get really specific about who we help and how we help them, and when is the best time to refer them.

So if I say to you, “The best time to refer somebody to me is when they are up to something big in their business. When they’ve gotten fed up with not having enough clients, or when they’ve decided to turn their business inside out, do it entirely differently. Those are great times to refer me to a client.” Now you have a trigger, and you know, “Oh, ok. You know, my friend so and so is in that place and I never thought of referring her to CJ.” So, that’s the kind of information that’s really, really helpful to referral sources. So that’s one thing.

And another thing is yeah, we do need to follow up with potential referral sources but not from the context of, “Do have anybody for me?” From the context of, “Hi, what's going on? This is going on with me. Anything I can do for you?” So staying in contact again, being of service, right? “How can I help you?” is what naturally makes people be in the mindset in reverse -- how can they help you?

Right. Reciprocity.

Absolutely. And the reciprocity isn’t necessarily exchanging referrals.

Right. In a lot of cases, you’ve already given them value, so reciprocity is then just paying him back now.

Could be, yeah.

That makes sense. So another thing that I've been terrible at (since I don’t hear a lot of questions coming through), is I've been using a CRM, but I haven’t been using it very well. And so really, it's just a collection people that I’ve sent emails to. And you other guys probably have some input on this too. I mean, how do you use that? I guess I need to be using it to keep track of who I need to be following up on and when (and that’s something that I have been doing). But are there some other uses or other good ways of utilizing that to do well with the follow up?

Call me crazy, but I used to use a CRM; now I just incorporate all that stuff into my GTD tool. I put my contacts right in my address book. And then I just put the ‘call so and so’ in my to-do list. If it's a follow up for a previous conversation, then I schedule it in my to-do list, in my GTD app. Because my GTD app is my direct source of things that I need to get done, it's something that I see, rather than a CRM which is very specialized, which is something you have to go out of your way to remember to look at.

I love that, Evan, because that kind of integration is I think where we all need to look, you know?

There is no one size fits all solution for anything, right?

Right. Again, that’s why I love your book. [Chuckles]

Yeah, you got to look for what works for you; where do you look? What keeps you focused? So to answer Chuck’s original question with the CRM, I tend to use a CRM kind of in reverse. So what I mean by that is instead of looking to my CRM, and having it tell me who I should follow up with, I tend to say, “Hmm, I have a reason to follow up today. Who are the people that that reason would benefit?” So, I just wrote a new article that I think would be of interest to a certain subset of people, let’s go to my CRM and pull a list of who those people are, and poke them and say, “Hi, I just wrote this article. I thought it would interest you.” So I use the reason as the driver rather than the CRM as the driver. And then the CRM is just a resource to help me do what I wanna accomplish.

Very interesting point, because while I put follow to my to-do list, what I often find happen, from a David Allen perspective that that’s a little bit of an inertia to always hitting my to-do list the way I feel like I should, meaning if there are things that have to get done, [unintelligible] on time. Instead, it piles up and then I have a day where I do things. So for example, I end up with one day which is a lot of follow up. And that sounds a little bit like what you’ve just described there. I just hadn’t thought about it that way. [Laughs] Again, very cool.

I really like it. And also, makes it easy I think to target some of your… so for example, if you are writing a blog post, if you know that it targets a particular person, then you can tailor it a little bit for them and follow up with them. And so the two can kind of inform each other, and I kind of like the interplay there.

Absolutely. Very often I'll have a particular client in mind when I write a blog post or when I write an article. And so I'll write to that client and say, “Hey, you may recognize some of the examples in here. Say what you think.”

That kind of works for me because I used to do the idea of every week, I need to follow up with three people and I sit there and be like, “I need to follow up with someone today.” I don’t know what to follow up to them with. And so it would be like, now I need to go and create something for them; and it turned into a huge task but if I turned around like you said and make it where I create a blog post or whatever and like, “Let’s see who I can give this to.” That’s probably actually -- at least for me -- can be a better route. It's going to be easier and kind of work with the existing stuff I already do.

I think it's easier for most people to look at it through that lens. It doesn’t have to be an article that you wrote or a blog post that you wrote, it can be somebody else’s that you run across and you said, “Oh, this is really cool.” And then you send that to half a dozen people and say, “This made me think of you.” And their reaction is, “Oh, here's this person thinking of me, and wanting to help me. I haven’t thought of that person in a while. Maybe we should work together.”

It's one last step too, right? You found this thing. Now you just have to find somebody to give it to instead of, “Oh, I need to give this person something. Let’s figure out what to give them.”

Yup, exactly.

Do you ever refer people to blog post that you read and didn’t write?

Oh yeah, all the time.

“So I read this and it reminded me of you and this particular issue that we talked about.”

Yeah, absolutely. “I thought this might be helpful to you.” I do that all the time with blog posts or articles or podcasts or events. I see an event being scheduled and I'll go, “Oh, I could think of people who really benefit from that event, and I'll tell them about it.”

And that’s a one by one follow up; not… I mean, you tell every single individual follow up where this event with ten people that you know, blast all ten of them the same message.

Yes. And I will also put it out on social media if I think it’s something that would benefit a lot of people in my network. But yeah, it's sending it to specific people with a personal note that I think it would be particularly relevant too, because it's that direct personal follow up when people realize that you are thinking of them, that has the impact.

Yeah, makes sense. So is there anything that you wish you had in the book, as things have changed over the last fifteen years, you wish you could put in there or had to put in there?

And or you are thinking of releasing a revision?

It's definitely worth getting even if there's a revision coming. I would tell people that. And I will definitely buy the third edition when it comes out.

Yeah, I have to say that even if the third edition is coming out in a month or two, if you wait for it, you are leaving money on the table, so go buy it. Go buy the second edition. It's worth it.

Thanks, guys. The third edition will be at least six months. It's already actually in the can. It's written, but publishers take time to do these things; unlike when you self-publish, you could just zap something up right away. When you are working with a big publisher, it takes a bit.

It's always the darn publishers.

So, I have another question for you, and this is something that whenever I tell people to go check out the book, I always tell them, “Yes, it's the one that the cover looks like an infomercial.” [Laughter]

So I have to ask about the cover; who designed it and is it going to change?

Well, it changes everytime. So I have zero influence over the cover design. This is again the publisher thing, right? Except for the fact that if they show it to me and I say, “I despise it,” then I could potentially get them to do something about that.

There is a funny story about that, which is once upon a time in the first edition, they decided that they didn’t really like the cover and they wanted to “update” it. They didn’t even tell me that they were going to update the cover. And in fact, the first time I found out about it was when my next shipment of the books arrives and they all have a new cover on them. And they took the cover that had been originally on it, completely changed it, and the new cover had image of two white men shaking hands. And when I saw that, I just went through the roof. [Chuckles]

I said, “Guys, are you out of your minds to use an image like this on a cover of my book? What were you thinking?” And what happened was as a result of that, they said, “Well, maybe it's time for you to do a new edition, and then we'll give you a new cover.” So this is where the second edition actually originated, although it would have happened anyway. So under those circumstances, they will accept my input. But with the current cover, basically it's done when I see it, right? And they show it to me and they say, “What do you think?” So, I can influence in small ways, but I cannot really get them to throw it out and start over because it costs money. So the short answer is the 3rd edition will have a new cover, but the bad news is I can’t predict what it will look like. [Laughter]

Well, we are hoping for the best there. Seriously, every time it's like… and then I've had a few people where I didn’t tell them that, they’d come back and they’d be like, “Is it this one? Are you sure?” “Yes.”

[Chuckles] Right. That’s always the reaction I get too.

Oh, that’s the first edition with the rainbow.

Oh, okay. That’s not the one that comes up on Amazon a lot when I search for it or have people search for it at least in the past. What comes up? Do you get the handshake one or the business card one now?

The one with the giant “Now”.

Yeah, that looks a lot better.

It's not horrible. I think I saw the first edition when I first looked it up.

Yeah, I think when I went from the paperback to clicking on the Kindle link a few years ago, the Kindle page had the rainbow color on it. And then that’s where I went back to Eric and Jeff and said, “Is it really this one?”

I still remember that. It left an impression.

Yeah, that one should hopefully be eradicated by now, although there are still a few copies of the first edition floating around. But the first edition didn’t even have the internet in it, so hopefully there's not too many of them left.

Well, atleast [unintelligible] with the content.

Yeah, the cover that’s on it now isn’t horrible. I think it was the older version that I saw.

Ok, good.

I was like, “Yikes!” [Chuckles] “But wait! There's more!”

And Chuck, I think it might have actually been a discussion between you and me back in the day. I just don’t remember if it was a few years ago.

Yeah, it happened. [Chuckles]

I remember specifically looking it up and coming back and going, “Evan, is this the right book?”

It happened to you a bunch of times now, it's happened to me a bunch of times so I couldn’t be sure either. [Laughs]

Yeah, the current cover is definitely better.

Ok, well I'm glad to hear that. And hopefully, the third edition will have an even better cover for whatever better turns out to be.

I'm trying to find a link to it, I can’t find it, but I'm sure since you wrote it, you'll know. Eric, sent me a link to this. It's like a 50 page PDF that’s for the next step after Get Clients Now and it talks about how to figure out based on monthly sales projections or what your revenue goals are, and how much time and money you have to spend on your marketing activities, what you should be working on. Does any of that get incorporated into the third edition or is that going stay as a separate thing?

it's going to stay separate. And I'll tell you why. Most people’s reaction to the 1 person marketing plan workbook which is what we were describing, is that it's very left brained linear, so it appeals to left brain linear people and it does not appeal to people who would not categorize themselves as that very much, because you have to really sit down and do mathematics around your plan. And I find that for most entrepreneurs, that is not just going to happen. They are not going to sit down and crunch the numbers that are going to help them see, “Well, if I wanna get this much in sales, how many clients is that? And therefore, how many presentations do I need to be making? And therefore, how many prospects do I need to make contact with on a regular basis?” It's a great approach for people who are comfortable with thinking in that way, but it's not a good approach for people who aren’t. So it's not in Get Clients Now and I'm not putting it in there. [Chuckles]

I know. It resonated immediately with me. And that’s a lot like Get Clients Now originally. I mean because before I read your book, marketing was this big mystical black cloud that somebody like me couldn’t deal with. But then, presented as a cookbook or recipes I could follow, I am a math geek, computer-versed and I can follow recipe just as good as anybody. So I mean, it really demystified the whole black magic of marketing.

And I find it very often that people with any kind of IT background are really happy with Get Clients Now. And usually, they are very happy with the 1 person marketing plan workbook. And truth be told, I had an IT background too, way, way in the distant past of…

You don’t have to tell us about the skills… [Laughter]

Well you know, we're talking about punch cards, ok?

I’d really wanna know. [Laughter]

That instantly puts it in a decade. [Laughter]

Yeah, and after that period of time, I also was a scientist for a time. I worked as a geologist. So for me, the idea of putting something into a system is like second nature.

That is a story I would like to hear sometime; you went from geologist to coach -- with a marketing program.

That’s a whole nother book, I think.

Yeah, maybe I'll write that someday.

The one question that’s been on my mind from the very beginning that I haven’t quite heard addressed yet, is are you still following your own Get Clients Now strategies and tactics or if you are certainly way up higher in the guru ladder than any of us. Are you using somewhat different tactics than the ones you published about?

I do have a little bit of a staff, so I do use typically four strategies regularly, and occasionally, more. But usually, only 4 still, and they execute certain things for me. And other things happen by themselves once I start them in motion. Get Clients Now, I talk about persistence effect; the payoff from being persistent in using any particular approach. When you start seeing results that don’t seem to at any possible way come from what you actually did, I get 20 years’ worth of persistence effect. So I have things that I don’t actually have to make happen that just happen for me. Like for example, getting invitations to appear on podcasts, right? That just happens. I don’t have to initiate those. So, there are a lot more things a lot like that for me, but in terms of actually following the basic methodology of the system, yes, I still do that.

Well, 20 years of habit, it's going to be harder for you not to do it, than to do it. [Laughter]

That is true.

Well, and it also makes it easier in coaching to say, “Hey look, this is what I do.”

It does.

All right, well let’s get into the picks. Eric, why don’t you start us off with picks?

Ok, so one pick. It's related. It's a post called Marketing Monday. It's a simple post and its targeted towards developers; people who like Jeff said, has this big black cloud of ‘what is marketing?’ But it kind of talks about how instead of trying to do a little bit of everyday on marketing, like “I don’t know what to do,” and just putting it off to work on code, he says that you get like one day or week and you use that day to kind of look for results from the previous week, to use marketing for this week, and you use the other four days of the week to do whatever your business is. It's different from Get Clients Now, like Get Clients Now is an everyday habit, but for some people, it might be easier to kind of batch things up and kind of get into marketing slowly, like one day a week at a time. And that way, you actually have some ample time to learn what you are doing, and not just be so afraid in making mistakes all the time.

All right, awesome. Is that all of your picks?

Yeah.

Evan, what are your picks?

Well, let’s see. I had one from last week which I wasn’t on, sorry about that, which is called Busy Trap. It was an article in the New York times basically about how we spend so much time doing that we don’t really… well I guess a lot of it… some of this is slow down and smell the roses, but it's more than that. I highly recommend reading it. It resonated a lot with me, it resonated a lot with Eric who read it right after I mentioned it in the Skype chat.

And another thing, I spent a lot of time on Twitter. I sometimes kid about being a twitter problem with a person, instead of the other way around. And the twitter clients are deplorable. But recently, Tweetbot, makes arguably the most client for the iPad or for iOS, they released, they are calling it alpha for OS X. And it is so much better than the Mac OSX Twitter client. So I highly recommend it even though it's in alpha, and please when these guys release, give them money because it's such a good app.

And ‘recently’ means 22 hours ago?

Yeah, ‘recently’ means I've heard about it on Twitter exactly. And it is was in the past day or so. Very recent.

Twitter app that doesn’t suck. I'm going to have to check it out.

Yes, I know it; an OSX Twitter app that doesn’t suck. And if you haven't used it on iOS, it is every bit as good on iOS as it is on the Mac, and even easier to use I think on iOS. It's a terrific app.

I'm skeptically optimistic here. We'll see.

[Laughs] Well, if you’ve haven’t used tweetbot before, I sincerely understand your skepticism. I felt the same way when someone recommended it to me.

All right, Jeff, what are your picks?

Have a couple. So one is a product service announcement, LinkedIn got hacked the other day, now Yahoo Voice. I don’t know if anybody even uses Yahoo Voice. Apparently, they got hacked and usernames and passwords were posted online. And so, if you don’t have multiple passwords and you do use Yahoo Voice, then change your password.

The other one is ZURB foundation is sort of the step child to Twitter bootstrap, not that they are related, but Twitter bootstrap gets all the attention and ZURB doesn’t, but they released version 3 recently, updated all the CSS which are now using SASS, which is in contrast to LESS that Twitter Bootstrap uses. So it's definitely worth a look.

And the last pick is a bit self-serving, but I was answering questions on Quora where our job sites and I updated a post to go on Freelance Switch that never got published on Freelance Switch, so it's a couple hundred different job sites categorized and I put that up to my blog. So that’s my final pick.

Awesome. Yeah. And is that the Freelancing Weekly that you put it in?

Yes.

Yeah, and just to plug Jeff’s Freelancing Weekly, awesome curation of articles for freelancers. All right, I'll jump in and go next with my picks. My first pick is motor oil.

It turns out that if you ignore your engine and you don’t put motor oil in it for a long time, it will break on you. And yeah, I got stuck up in the canyon for about 2.5 hours waiting for my father in law to come get me. And then, we spent four days swapping our engines out of our minivan. So, just so you know, you might wanna check the oil in your car.

My other pick is Rapportive. Rapportive is a plugin for Gmail and Google apps. And I use Google apps for my email. What it does is at the bottom of every email, it has its own little section that it inserts in there, and if you look at the emails from various people, I'll just pull them out right here from somebody that I know has it, it basically gives you a picture of them, off of their social networks, it lists their latest tweets, it lists information off of LinkedIn, it tells you what jobs they have, where they work, that kind of stuff. I mean, anything that they can find off of the various social networks that the people have information in.

And so if you are doing some kind of follow up, you wanna see what's going on with these folks, then Rapportive is just a super way of having that right there in your email so that when you reply, you can say, “Oh, by the way, I saw you tweeted about x, y and z and that looked really cool. Congratulations on whatever it was that you were telling us about.” And that kind of thing. And really, it is really a nice tool and it's something out a couple of situations where I'm trying to remember how I know this person, and then I can go and look and I can go, “Oh yeah, they do this. I met them at this conference.” And that kind of thing. It's not a CRM, but it is helpful in seeing what they are about.

And we'll go ahead and we'll let CJ do some picks now.

Ok, so given the kind of stuff that we’ve been talking about today, I'm going to suggest two articles that I wrote recently as possible, thanks to expand further on some of these ideas. One of them is, Why You Don’t Market The Way You Should. The things that might suggest you should be doing something else instead of doing something more.

And then another one that actually came up a little bit in our conversation today as well was the idea of one size does not fit all. So that’s another recent article, and that one is titled In Marketing, One Size Does Not Fit All; about how to tailor what it is that you really want to be accomplishing, in such a way that it gets the results that’s right for you and the approaches that are right for you.

All right.

Can I ask a real stupid question about the blog? I'm looking for a way to subscribe via Google reader or RSS, is there one and I'm just missing it? Or there isn’t one?

On getclientsnow.net?

Yeah, well the link that you said is at getclientsnow.com.

Yeah, so getclientsnow.net, there is on the lower hand corner on the home page.

Oh ok, thank you.

Are they the same articles between the two?

No, they are different.

Ah. [Chuckles] So does getclientsnow.com have RSS?

It does not because it is not structured as a blog.

Ok, I thought that might be the case.

Yeah.

All right. Well, go check out Get Clients Now.net and add it to your RSS reader.

Done.

Well, let’s go ahead and wrap this up. I just want to remind folks that you can get us in iTunes. You can find us in the iTunes AppStore and go ahead and leave us a review. We really appreciate that. We're also on Twitter at @RubyFreelancers. Rubyfreelancers.com is where the show notes and blog is hosted. Is there anything else that you guys want to add before we wrap this up?

Just to thank CJ for the time. Really appreciate it.

This has been a great podcast. I don’t normally listen to them afterward. I'm probably going to have to listen to this one again – at least once, if not twice.

Yeah, if the book wasn’t pure gold, the podcast is just icing on the cake.

Thank you. Glad to have been here.

All right. We'll catch you all next week!