Make Your Creativity Pay. Pete Mosley

If there is a strong social or spiritual theme within your work, it’s a valuable part of your story. Be clear and open about these things.

      In order to maximise your chances of success there are three things that you need to ensure. Your work must be of sufficient quality for people to want you to come and work for them again and again, you must develop and maintain a personal ‘Track Record’ which proves you can deliver on your promises, and you need a clear sense of your values. These things will enable you to communicate key aspects of your work with clarity and conviction.

      If you work hard to maintain all of the above, you will probably find that after a while work begins to come to you as a result of personal recommendation. This is the most effective form of marketing you can possibly employ. Ideally, you want people to be contacting you with sales enquiries or interesting opportunities rather than you having to endlessly send letters or publicity leaflets to people to try and stimulate their interest. It takes time to establish this pattern – but the initial effort involved could well set you up for the rest of your career. So – what do you need to do to make this happen?

      Essentially, you need to focus on the way that you build relationships. It’s all about creating and maintaining relationships with key people in your field. This is best achieved by communicating wisely and effectively rather than by employing scattergun marketing techniques such as huge mailings of letters and leaflets or employing indiscriminate email campaigns. People will only hate you for doing this.

      To do this well, you first need to build a complete picture of the network that exists within your field. You then need to identify key people, organisations and companies within this who will be the starting points for your own personal network.

      The best way to start this process off is to grab a really large sheet of paper and start to visually map out the people and organisations that you know about and have some contact with. Use lines to connect people and organisations that you know are connected in some way – you will be able to use these existing networks and relationships to help get your message across. Ask others to help you with this –- especially more experienced people who can point out bits that you have missed or that you have been unsure about including.

       The 80/20 rule

      Getting a large part (80%) of your business from a relatively small proportion (20%) of your clients is regarded as the norm. So it makes sense to secure your relationship with the 20%. Talk to them, give them a bit of extra attention, throw in the odd freebie or a bit of extra time. Keeping them is often all about the quality of relationship you maintain with them. However, and this is the big one, circumstances beyond your control can take these customers or clients away no matter how good the relationship.

      Therefore it pays to be constantly on the lookout for and developing relationships with potential clients who have the same sort of profile as your existing 20%. Widen the gene pool. Make relationships with potential customers even if it might be ages before you actually get a contract from them. Always look for people who are equivalent in some way to the folk you work with already. Make friends with them and cultivate them. It’s a good insurance policy. Oh, and by the way, when you lose a client, don’t throw away the personal relationship. Cultivate that too, as you never know when an old contact might bring new business back in your direction.

      The real trick is to use your network in a way that cuts out the need for ‘cold calling’, or gets other people to help make the difficult introductions.

      If you do want to send something in the post or by email, here’s how to make sure people read it:

      Getting people to read your mail is problematic at the best of times. Getting them to both read it and respond to it is even harder.

      The basic trick is this: Never, ever, send anything to anyone unless you have spoken to them first.

       Think about how you sort your mail in the morning - junk mail gets binned, brown envelopes go in the ‘pending’ pile (unless they are cheques - you’ll be looking out for those!), and business and personal letters are put in different piles.

       Then, before anything else, you always open the post that you have been waiting for with a sense of anticipation. The sense of anticipation is usually underpinned by a business or personal relationship.

      So, in order to make sure your mail is not only opened but prioritised:

       Talk to the person you want to send stuff to.

       Ask them for guidance on the format of your enquiry, application, or the service they want to hear about.

       Customise the mailing to their requirements.

       Call them, or email, and let them know that the letter is on the way.

       Use a first class stamp, and put it in the mail.

      This also works with documents you want to send digitally.

      Of course, this only applies to one-off or very small mailings. It does, however, help build the relationship.

      Finally, if you get what you need, say thank you for the help and advice. Next time you write they will remember you and treat you as someone with whom they already have a working relationship.