Marketing Book Review: Get Clients Now by C.J. Hayden

About a month ago, one of our new friends we met at this year's DrupalCon pointed Dagny and I towards a book called Get Clients Now. She had previously used the book with some success and introduced the book to the Small Drupal Shop slack channel. Several of the channel attendees decided to grab the book and follow along during the month of June. It turned out to be a great learning experience and I highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to learn a solid marketing process for professional service firms.

The book says that "marketing is telling people what you do, over and over." It breaks the marketing process into four distinct phases: filling the pipeline, following up, having sales conversations, and closing sales. It then walks you through determining which phase you need to focus on and developing a 28 day action plan. It is this structure and framework I found most helpful. It provides a bunch of individual tactics that can be used depending on what phase you want to focus on. You pick the tactics you will focus on like you are picking items off a restaurant menu.

It highlights that marketing is all about consistency. It also mostly strips away excuses. Of course, I was able to find a few excuses and I did not complete the 28 day plan. One of the wonderful things about this book is that it does a great job of encouraging you to revisit your plan and set realistic goals. And when you fall off the wagon like I did, you can always identify why and start a new 28 day program.

One of the things I learned about myself is that I have let my email inboxes get out of control. I know a million different tactics for controlling my inbox but I just don't do it. Not being on top of my email made staying on top of my marketing tasks very difficult. In my first run through the book I had grandiose plans of spending up to 3 hours a day doing marketing activities. I bit off more than I could chew and even after revising my plan down to be more manageable I still had too much to handle. With this knowledge I know how to revise my plan for July and today is day 1 of my next 28 day marketing plan.

Thanks to Tara of Smilodon Creative for the book suggestion and to all the members of the Small Drupal Shop Slack channel for the encouragement and accountability.