C.J. Hayden is the author of three books and over 300 articles on marketing, entrepreneurship, life purpose, and social change. Her bestselling book Get Clients Now! A 28-Day Marketing Program for Professionals, Consultants and Coaches has become the marketing bible for thousands of independent professionals.
C.J. is also the author of The One-Person Marketing Plan Workbook, co-author of Get Hired Now! A 28-Day Program for Finding the Job You Want, and a contributing author to Guerrilla Marketing on the Front Lines.
Since 1992, C.J. has been a business coach, consultant, and trusted advisor for hundreds of entrepreneurs and professionals. She specializes in helping social entrepreneurs, activists, and community leaders launch and sustain successful ventures to effect social change.
C.J.’s articles have appeared in Home Business, Selling Power, Rainmaker Report, SOHO Business Report, Principled Profit, Choice, CareerSource, California Job Journal, Bay Area BusinessWoman, and dozens of online magazines, including About.com, SalesDog, and The CEO Refresher. You can see samples of her articles here.
A popular speaker and workshop leader, C.J. has presented hundreds of programs on marketing, entrepreneurship, life purpose, and social change to corporate clients, professional associations, community groups, and small businesses. She has taught for John F. Kennedy University, Mills College, The Coaches Training Institute, Leaderspring, Chevron, Federal Express, Marriott, Wells Fargo, SCORE, and the U.S. Small Business Administration. You can see upcoming programs here.
As an activist and social entrepreneur, C.J. is the founder of the Send Girls to School Project, and serves on the boards of Global Initiative to Advance Entrepreneurship and the San Francisco chapters of Social Enterprise Alliance and Ashoka Youth Venture.
You can find out more about C.J. at Get Clients Now!, Get Hired Now!, Social Entrepreneur Coach, or her blog, How to Become a Hero. Or connect with her on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.
Thank you very much for giving us a little of your time, C.J.! You must know how much our members appreciate your teachings. A search on your name in the Forums brings up hundreds of threads that reference you. So it's truly exciting to have you 'in person' here.
Your prior-to-30-years-old-history is purely amazing. What an unusual life, and how far you have come! You are certainly proof positive that a person can become whatever s/he wants, with sufficient effort. What personal quality (or qualities) would you say helped you to overcome obstacles and continue reaching for the stars?
First of all, thanks for your kind words. For many years, I was hesitant to share my personal background. I didn’t want people in my professional world to know I was a high school dropout and homeless teenager, or that I struggled for so long to figure out what I wanted to do for a living. But I finally realized that it helped other people to hear about how I overcame my obstacles. If I could start out with no education and earn a college degree, so could they. If I could go from having not enough money to rent a room to owning a home, so could they. If I could take a career that consisted of a random string of jobs and turn it into a sustainable, enjoyable livelihood, they could, too. So now I make it a practice to tell people about where I came from when they ask about my apparent success.
One of the personal qualities that has helped me enormously is being a gatecrasher. What I mean by that is that I’m willing to go places where no one has invited me, and where others might think I don’t belong. When you’re first starting out in a new career, course of study, or a new business, it often feels like that. You’re like a fish out of water, and you feel as if everyone is saying behind your back, “What’s she doing here?” You have to be willing to work through that feeling of not belonging, or not really knowing what you’re doing, even if others are skeptical or resistant about you being there. Just “take it like you own it.” If you act like you don’t belong somewhere, others won’t accept you either. I’ve always believed that I needed to create my own future, because no one else was going to do it for me.
Somehow, you have progressed from home-based jewelry maker, to renowned marketing consultant, to advocate for social change (with many other titles sprinkled in the continuum as well). Can you give us a clue how the various phases of your career have led to one another?
I’d like to say I had a master plan for my career from the very beginning, but that definitely wasn’t the case! There are a few themes, though, that appeared very early in my working life that have stuck with me, and eventually became the basis of what I do now. One is writing, one is teaching, another is scouting out simple answers to difficult questions, and still another is helping people achieve their goals. I’ve always been interested in discovering new ways to do things, writing them down, and teaching them to others, in order to help people improve their lives, or at least their environment. Most of the jobs I’ve held had those elements in common, whether I was working as a systems analyst, geological researcher, or management consultant.
One of the reasons I love what I do now is because it’s so varied and flexible. I can write one day and teach the next, coach or consult for a few hours, then spend time scouting out some new territory in an area that interests me. It suits my very eclectic interests. There was a time when I felt as if I would never figure out what I wanted to do for a living, but I’m glad I kept looking and didn’t give up before the miracle. It took me a long time to find a career that really suited me, but now I can’t imagine doing anything else.
What is the key teaching of your Get Clients Now! system? Why does it work so well?
The essence of the
Get Clients Now! system is this: the secret to successful marketing is choosing a set of simple, effective things to do, and doing them consistently. The biggest marketing mistake I see independent professionals make is doing too little of too much. They do a little networking and when they don’t immediately land all the clients they need, they try a bit of public speaking, and when that doesn’t produce immediate results, they decide to write some articles, and so on. They try to do so many different things that they never put enough effort into any one endeavor for it to pay off.
The reason
Get Clients Now! works so well is because using the system forces you to narrow your focus to only those things you can effectively do. If you build your entire marketing plan around just a handful of marketing activities instead of trying every approach under the sun, you’ll be able to follow through on the approaches you select, and execute them well. It’s really that simple. I tell people that it doesn’t matter so much what you choose as it does that you choose. Almost any marketing approach can work if you use it consistently and allow yourself enough time to do it well.
You were teaching and coaching, and at some point, you started writing down and publishing your ideas. How did you come to the decision to be an author?
I had wanted to be a writer ever since I was a little girl. I started writing poems and short stories at a very early age. My first poem was published in the school magazine when I was 8. Then, as happens so often in life, I was sidetracked into an entirely different career (or in my case, several careers!). But by the age of 20, I was writing on the job. It just wasn’t the sort of writing I had originally pictured. My first published writings as an adult were user manuals for various computer systems, then I wrote product development requirements, scientific papers, and a host of other technical documents and guides.
So by the time I found myself working as a coach and workshop leader, I was an old hand at writing step-by-step how-to material. I started by writing short articles about the same topics I was addressing with my clients, then began creating workbooks, and finally felt ready to tackle a full-length book. Now that I’ve written three books, I sometimes marvel at how long it took me to fulfill that childhood dream of being an author. It was a long way around, but I finally did get there!
Your programs for entrepreneurs and other groups focus on "relationship marketing, fearless self-promotion, and entrepreneurial success." Could you elaborate a little on the 'relationship marketing' and 'fearless self-promotion' parts?
For the independent professional, marketing is all about relationships. People like to do business with those they know, like, and trust, and you can’t build the know-like-and-trust factor by running ads or blasting out promotional emails. Warm approaches have a much higher payoff than cold approaches, yet the average new business owner spends a substantial amount of their time soliciting business from people they don’t know. Instead, their focus should be on building relationships – with potential clients, with possible referral sources, and with colleagues who can connect them with opportunities.
The reason most professionals avoid this has quite a bit to do with the other topic of fearless self-promotion. Getting to know people personally brings up a lot of fear. It’s so much easier to run an ad, send an email, or hide out behind your website. Then you don’t have to take the risk of rejection. But passive, impersonal marketing is so much less effective than active, personal marketing that you’re really shooting yourself in the foot when you do this. So it’s critical to learn to manage your fears about self-promotion so you’ll have the courage to market yourself actively.
We are a community of virtual assistants. Many of us are marketing specialists, and all of us have to market our services. Over your years of studying what kinds of marketing work best, what have you learned that is particularly applicable to those of us who work virtually?
Because your client base can be located anywhere, your marketing can also be located anywhere. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Your target market has no geographic limitations, which is great. But it’s deceptively easy to start spreading yourself too thin by trying to market to the entire universe.
You need to choose a specific focus for your marketing in order to be able to target appropriate prospects and tailor your message to their needs. The best kind of focus is to choose a niche that consists of both a target market (who you are marketing to) and a specialty (capability that sets you apart). For example, your target market could be real estate agents and your specialty could be marketing campaigns, or your target market could be health care practitioners and your specialty could be medical office management. When you have a clearly defined niche, it enables you to seek out prospective clients – and for them to find you – in the vast sea of possibilities. Without a clear niche, there’s no way for you to prioritize your marketing activities or craft any sort of targeted marketing message.
Do you have experience with any virtual assistants? Are there ways you might suggest that virtual assistants, in particular, can serve marketing or other business needs in the contemporary business climate?
I’ve had a virtual assistant for 7 years myself, and I find my VA to be invaluable for accomplishing a myriad marketing tasks. What I would suggest to any VA is to be proactive about suggesting to your clients how you can help them market themselves more widely or more efficiently on a regular basis. Don’t wait for your clients to ask you to take on additional marketing tasks. Instead, discover what would be the most useful forms of marketing to the particular type of client you serve, learn how to do those things effectively, then start proposing them to all your clients. You’ll get more work from your existing clients, they’ll be thrilled with the increased exposure, and they’ll refer to you to their colleagues who want to know the secret of their success.
Some examples of the type of regular marketing activities VAs can help with: submitting your client’s articles to article directories and ezines, researching new venues for placing articles, archiving past articles on your client’s website, researching content for your client’s blog or social networking posts, adding new contacts to your client’s marketing database, sending out email broadcasts to your client’s opt-in list, sending postcards to hot prospects or past customers, submitting press releases about your client’s activities, posting calendar listings about your client’s events, posting reviews of your client’s book or product, monitoring social networks, blogs, and message boards to alert your client about opportunities, researching venues for your client to speak, etc., etc., etc.
How did you learn to be an excellent writer, and what would you recommend to VAs who struggle with writing?
Well, first, thank you for that lovely acknowledgment of my writing. Many years ago, one of my mentors told me something simple but profound. “Writers write,” she said. In order to become a better writer, you have to write, as regularly as you can. One of the ways I honed my writing skills was writing articles for a publication that had a fixed word count and a hard deadline. When you have to sit down at the keyboard and produce a piece that gets across your point in no more than 600 words by 5:00 PM, it’s amazing how fast your writing skills can improve. It’s like an intense workout that builds your muscles.
One thing I would recommend to anyone who wants to become a better writer is to partner with a professional editor. When an editor marks up your piece and sends it back to you, there’s a tremendous amount you can learn from his or her corrections and suggestions. Every time I’ve worked with an editor, I’ve learned something new about how to write better. So don’t be afraid to get feedback on your writing; it can only help you improve.
"My own work is consciously chosen to honor some of my highest values: being of service, creative expression, human connection, and independence. Until I found this work over seventeen years ago, I wandered from one career and business enterprise to the next, with minimal success at any of them. Marketing was always a struggle. I was afraid to do it and procrastinated to avoid it.
"When everything turned around for me was the moment I declared I would start a business that honored my values. As soon as I did this, marketing became effortless, and more than that, overwhelmingly successful. I could speak authentically about my belief in what I was doing, and people I had never met suddenly believed in me."
This is from an article on your site. What was it about honoring your values that made this different from your previous approaches to marketing?
Like most of us, I think, I drifted into my first several jobs and business enterprises because they were in some way right in front of me. I became a computer programmer because I knew another high school dropout who had become one, and it paid better than waiting tables. I became a management consultant because I had the skills to do the work and there were companies that needed what I could do. But those career choices didn’t honor my highest values. I never felt like I was serving the greater good, or expressing myself creatively, or connected enough with humanity, or had enough independence. So I didn’t bring my best self to the job, nor did I bring it to my marketing.
If what you do for a living in some way isn’t YOU, it’s devilishly hard to convince other people to hire you to do it. You come off as inauthentic; people don’t believe what you’re telling them. And you don’t feel authentic. You put on your selling voice or your marketing face, and you say all the right words, but even you don’t believe them. That makes it incredibly difficult to get yourself motivated about marketing.
But when the work you do honors your highest values, you leave all that behind. You believe in yourself and in what you’re doing, so you can talk about it enthusiastically in a completely authentic way, and people naturally find you believable and want to work with you. That makes marketing almost effortless.
What's next for you? What projects are you currently working on that you would you like to mention? Where does a person of so many accomplishments go from here?
The most rewarding thing about writing a bestselling book like Get Clients Now! is that it buys me the freedom to spend a fair amount of time working on behalf of causes I believe in. Currently, I’m on the leadership team of two projects to help young people build better lives for themselves and their communities:
Send Girls to School, and
Ashoka Youth Venture.
I’m also doing a lot of writing and speaking about how solopreneurs and small business owners can serve a social cause with their business while still making a good living. If any of your members would like to have me speak to their group or contribute an article to their publication about that topic, I’d be honored.
Interview graciously conducted by: Mary H. Ruth of Virtual Writing and Communications: Specializing in writing, editing, and social media marketing, Mary has been a virtual assistant, and member of VAF, since 2007. Please visit her blog, Virtual Assistance and You, a journal for VAs and their clients.
Interview with C.J. Hayden, author of Get Clients NOW!
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