Are You Working With Amateurs?

Here are a few food-for-thought reflection questions, inspired by today’s guest: Are you working with amateur clients or ones who bring out the best in you? Are you pricing the “aggravation factor” into your proposals when necessary? What about “throwing proposals over the fence,” creating self-inflicted stress when prospective clients ghost you as a result? Finally, are you stuck in the feast-or-famine cycle of your business?

If any of the questions above resonate, you will love this conversation with Ilise Benun, who has been running her business helping creative professionals for over 35 years. Ilise shares The Proposal Oreo Strategy; how she stays consistent with content creation while walking the line between discipline and rigidity; why she sees word-of-mouth marketing as a result, not real marketing; and creating abundant interstitial time by embracing eigenzeit—the German term meaning “the time inherent to a process itself.”

More About Ilise: Ilise Benun is the founder of Marketing-Mentor.com, the go-to online resource for creative professionals who want better projects with bigger budgets, through which she offers business coaching. She is also a national speaker and author of 7 books, including "The Creative Professional's Guide to Money," three online courses via CreativeLive and Domestika.org, and The Simplest Marketing Plan – all tailored to the needs of creative professionals. She has also been hosting the Marketing Mentor Podcast since 2008, with over 465 episodes at the time of this recording.

🌟3 Key Takeaways:

• Amateur clients are those who have not worked with a provider like you before and might have unrealistic expectations.
• The Oreo Proposal Method: Two cookies and a yummy center, comprising of a qualifying conversation to determine mutual fit, a live proposal walk-through, followed by a conversation about next steps.
• The best marketing is part of your day-to-day work, not an isolated set of activities. Consider three ongoing tools: strategic networking, targeted outreach, and content marketing.

📝Permission: Stop listening to the scolding voice in your head. See your business as a laboratory, where everything is an experiment.

✅Do (or Delegate) This Next: Clear even more space in your calendar with interstitial time, space between events or obligations that you can use to prepare and reflect. Ensure that you have big blocks of time that you can use to let ideas marinate and develop.

📘Books Mentioned:

• Free Time: Lose The Busywork, Love Your Business
• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One
• The Creative Professional's Guide to Money: How to Think About It, How to Talk About it, How to Manage It by Ilise Benun

🔗Resources Mentioned:

• Ilise on the web, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube
• Ilise’s podcast: Marketing Mentor and Newsletter: Quick Tips
• Marketing the Invisible: How to Get Better Clients with the Proposal Oreo Strategy - In Just 7 Minutes with Ilise Benun

🎧Related Podcast Episodes:

• 133: Hire People Who Are Better Than You with Terri Trespicio
• 117: Tiny Marketing Actions with Pamela Slim

💻 Access Free Time episode transcripts on Podscribe »

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