The slide above is one that I use in many of my presentations when explaining social media marketing to small businesses. Relationships and its key role in small businesses marketing is something I believe in firmly and practice consciously.
Looking back at Buzzmedia, relationships have been the reason for my business’ success to date. My relationships with certain individuals and partners allowed me to make an easy transition from my job to business, secure major consulting jobs, and led to workshop opportunities with organisations like UNICEF Malaysia.
Profitable Relationships: Harder than you think
It’s easy to say that relationships are important–everyone knows that–but how do you initiate and grow relationships strategically with potential customers and business partners?
Most people aren’t extroverts and saying hi to a complete stranger isn’t something that comes naturally. What more if you try to connect with influential individuals like C-level executives?
Clients from hell are more proof that profitable relationships are hard to establish. I’m willing to bet that you have more customers that make you want to pull your hair out rather than the ones you’d want to invite over for dinner.
Relationship Marketing for Solopreneurs
Relationship Marketing for Solopreneurs is a new multimedia home-study course by Larry Kelto and Jim Sheard, Ph.D that helps to simplify relationship marketing. Larry is the founder and publisher of TheSolopreneurLife.com, an online resource for solopreneurs and has over 17 years experience in solo businesses. Jim is a Ph.D in industrial psychology and has been operating his own business since 1996.
The course contains the 139-page book of the same name, a workbook and checklist in PDF format. Also included is a MP3 file of audio lessons and bonus lessons. Relationship Marketing for Solopreneurs helps break down the process into easy to understand chunks and convert knowledge to actionable steps.
If you buy ‘The Highway’ option of the product, you will also receive additional bonuses, including emails to remind and encourage you in your relationship marketing over 6 months (super helpful for busy solopreneurs). The course also helps you jump start your relationship marketing through the ‘Get Connected’ discussion forum where other small business owners and solopreneurs can network, and ask questions and receive answers from the authors and each other.
What you will learn
The course is divided into 6 main parts:
- Initiate Connection to Have an Opportunity
- Provide Value to Make a Difference
- Act With Integrity to Instill Trust
- Demonstrate Respect to Show You Care
- Communicate With Purpose to Strengthen Understanding
- Share Experiences to Achieve Mutual Goals
I feel that Larry and Jim have produced a great guide to help small business owners implement relationship marketing in their businesses. The book and audio file break down relationship marketing into digestible chunks and the workbook helps you convert that theory to knowledge. Using these 3 together is the key to getting the most out of this book.
Traditional selling and marketing tactics take a back seat in this product. Instead it focuses on building and strengthening relationships by providing value in your business, effective and purposeful communication and focusing on being a partner of the client instead of just being a solution provider.
Business topics and concepts are explained in plain English. I wish that I could explain finding and choosing a niche as clearly as in the book:
Being in the right niche is like wearing comfortable clothing and shoes…they fit you perfectly. if you wear shoes and clothes that fit, you feel, move, and look better. …When you walk into a room
with clothes that don’t fit, you want to hide! You have no desire to interact, no desire to connect!
If you read the book and implement the exercises, you should immediately begin to build more business relationships that will turn out to be profitable and enjoyable.
What could be better
To complete the course, you must divide your attention to the book, the workbook and the MP3 audio lessons. I found that this was a bit haphazard because I had to read the PDF book on my computer, write down my answers in the workbook which I printed out and listen to my iPod which contained the audio lessons.
Unfortunately I’m not sure how to improve this system. Maybe if the book was also in audio, I could at least ditch my computer when consuming the book.
However as I’ve hinted above, I think that the content is very high quality and found the workbook to be very invaluable in making the information actionable.
Who should buy Relationship Marketing for Solopreneurs
This product is admittedly not for everyone. However here are some people I think will benefit greatly from it:
- Individuals who are a little introverted, and prefer non face-to-face communications e.g. Twitter & email
- Individuals who feel that they aren’t very business savvy
- Individuals who hate reading business books
- Work-from-home parents
- Business owners who prefers doing the technical work rather than organizational, managerial work
- Independent financial services consultants (insurance, will writers, unit trust)
Very limited 2-day, pre-launch discount
Relationship Marketing for Solopreneurs is officially on sale 12 October. However you can enjoy a 25% discount on the sale price if you purchase the course on 5-6 October with this discount code:
TSL01PL25
I hope you’ve found this review helpful. If you’re interested in the course, please visit the product page to learn more.
