Have you ever had a lightbulb moment when you realise that you’ve committed a major sin? I’ve done it twice this week!

Watch this to find out what I’ve been up to and why you need to avoid doing the same…

Transcript:

Hi and welcome to another episode of BaranovTV, designed to demystify the world of accounts and tax and to help your business grow.

Today’s episode is a bit of a confessional.

I’ve recently committed two cardinal sins and thought I would share them with you because there is a worthwhile message, definitely in the first but probably in the second as well. In the second there is also just a little bit of a plea from me.

So what on earth am I talking about?

Well first off, we all know and we’ve spoken in the past about the fact that it’s the business owner’s responsibility to make sure that its clients and customers know of all the services that it could offer.

You could have a customer where you supply one product or service but if you’ve got other services and products you need to make sure that they know about those too. Because they already trust you, there’s a good possibility that they would like some of the others.

So it’s your responsibility to make sure that they know about those and that you remind them on a reasonably regular basis.

That’s what I realised we haven’t been doing.

And therefore that’s my fault because that’s part of my responsibility within our business, to make sure that all of our clients know of all of our different services.

• But we’ve added a service and we haven’t really told anybody.
• It hasn’t really been put on our website.
• We haven’t really discussed it with existing clients although we are routinely incorporating it into new client meetings and our proposals etc.

I realised this, during the week and I thought, ‘oh no that’s a cardinal sin, I shouldn’t be doing that. I know I’m trying to record a whole load of BaranovTV episodes because we’re going to be travelling for a little while. I’ll do a BaranovTV episode on it.’

And that’s when I committed my second cardinal sin.

I recorded a BaranovTV episode, in much the same way as I’m recording this one. But I realised when I watched it back actually it wasn’t educational, it was much more salesy.

It was talking about the benefits of this new service which is called Spotlight. And it’s talking about the benefits of it but it was a kind of pitch because I’m so used to talking about it in the meetings that we’ve been having.

My tone was very much more around the benefits and the value that it can give than, more than the educational benefits of putting it into a BaranovTV. I hope that makes some sense.

So I’ve decided I’m not going to send you that one, that’s canned!

What I’ve done is I’ve put a blog post onto the website and I will be coming out to clients to make sure that you know what that’s all about.

Essentially it’s a reporting tool. It enables us to show you the performance of your business graphically.

But I don’t ever want BaranovTV to become a sales pitch, because that’s not the idea behind it.

And that’s where my request comes in!

I’d like you all to hold me accountable. We talk about accountability quite a lot. I’d like you to hold me accountable so that if BaranovTV ever does start to feel salesy, please just send me an email, or shout to me whatever it may be and just point that out to me because that’s not what it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be about value for you guys.

So my two cardinal sins were forgetting to keep our clients informed of our services as they evolve and I would heartily recommend that you make sure that you are doing that too. And secondly is to make sure that your communications actually do maintain their values and their goals.

Those are my two cardinal sins for this week which I thought I’d share with you because I hope there is some value in them for you. I’m going to disappear off and I’ll see you all very soon.