Collaborators vs Clients
Collaborators vs Clients
Hi everyone and welcome to my video series. Today I wanted to talk to you briefly on clients versus collaborators and why collaboration and people that can refer to you a more important sometimes.
So, we all have our ideal target audience. Mine are B2B professional services for instance but I’m not always going to come across lawyers or accountancy firms that need my help straight away. In fact, I might not even know them. So that can be quite difficult to get an inroad there.
But what’s very helpful and what I found very useful for me as a business is to meet people who I call collaborators or referrers that might actually get asked whether or not they know a marketing consultant. So for instance, for me, some of my collaborators are a web developers, PR consultants and branding consultants. One of my first clients is a property management company and that came through a referral from a copywriter because that copywriter was asked, do you know somebody that specializes in marketing?
So for me, I’m always really interested in meeting people that will be asked if they know somebody that does marketing. And that could be someone within my industry, but not necessarily my direct clients.
I’m also interested in working with collaborators in a particular industry. So you might be too. So for instance, you know, I’m just taking me as an example in working with people in law, so there could be IT consultancies that specialize in law, recruitment agencies specialize in law and they all get asked the kind of same back-office questions of who do you know that can do X, Y, and Z?
And because you’re working in the same industry, you have the experience and it’s very easy to refer between yourselves because you know people that work with those particular firms. So as much as it’s great to have ideal clients because they are the people that you want the target, who are your ideal collaborators, whether or not that’s within the actual work that you do.
So for me, it’d be creative industries or the actual industry that you want to work in. So law or accountancy, who makes the connections? Who’s going to get asked the question, who do you know that does X?
And I think it’s just really important to think about it like that sometimes because we forget as we zoom in on who our clients are. We forget that there are people that are meeting all types of clients and we need to connect with them. So my ask of you this week is making a list of who your collaborators are or who you want them to be, and go and start connecting with them because they are more than likely to be asked the question at some point. Who do you know that does X? So I hope you found that helpful. Please do like and share. And until next time, bye for now.
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