Land More Clients with a Solid Project Management Plan with Bastien Siebman
Jan 25, 2023
In this episode of Cash In On Camera, Asana Certified Pro and Forum Leader Bastien Siebman discusses the importance of a solid project management plan in attracting more clients. A well-organized and efficient project management strategy can streamline workflow and increase productivity and help you create a content strategy that will help you attract more clients and stand out from the competition.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll hear…
▶️ [0:58] Yeah, so Asana is actually a work management solution allowing you to really collaborate with your teams and even work by yourself more efficiently. I happened to choose Asana myself about 10 years ago as a tool to manage my own company, and I started to get better at Asana we were just a handful at the time and people started to ask me for help and one day someone asks if they can actually pay me for help. And I started side hustling like this. I was lucky enough to live in Europe, so I was working during the day in Europe and I was side hustling in the evenings, for US clients doing consulting on Asana. And things led to another. I actually became active on forums. I wrote several books on Asana. I studied to have really a lot of different clients. The world actually studied to get out there and. That led me to actually have my own company now. So we are an agency specializing in Asana itself. We worked with over 300 clients all around the world, and we do everything from A to Z when it comes to Asana.
▶️ [2:40] Exactly. It wasn't the goal at first. And being a summit consultant actually did not exist at all at the time. It was too small. And after years and years, I started to realize that this ecosystem was actually growing. The community was growing and we started to see consultants emerging and companies emerging. And also the tool itself, Asana was structuring different programs around the tool to help people like me emerge and create companies. But it wasn't the goal and I think it's important to go with your passion, go with your gut, and if you feel like there's something there, maybe push a little bit further and see if you can maybe sell your time, sell your knowledge, try to create something. And in my case, I think the key element was to just create content, write a book, or another book, do videos, and answer on forums. And that really helped me become better and really show my expertise and that led me to have actually clients contacting me almost every day to work with me, instead of having me reach out to them to work with them. They've seen me online, they've seen the way I work, the way I talk. They've seen my expertise and they come to me directly. Thanks to this content I created.
▶️ [4:52] I think this is a great example of, in your case, you did it with a particular Tool, a project management tool. But this that Bastien just shared with you is something that can be applied to the coaching and consulting industry in general, right? If you are good at whatever it is that you do, and you're helping more clients, you're actually gaining a lot of intelligence by the questions they're asking, the language they're using, the problems they're having. And then if you follow that up by creating content and maybe demonstrative content especially, that can help to fuel your business. So let's dive into the project management side of things. How did the tool, Asana in this case, but a project management tool really help you from a content perspective? Was it about the organization? Was it about efficiency? Explain to us how that played into the development of your brand.
▶️ [7:24] No, I think it's never too soon. And even if you are just by yourself, it does make sense to have people around you, even if it's an assistant, like one hour per day or two hours per day. It does bring a lot of value. But if you're not there yet, I think it does make sense to still have a tool to be able to capture ideas and organize your ideas. Plan your different campaigns and usually, we juggle so many topics at the same time. It's just really hard to manage by just using pen and paper. So a tool like Asana can really help you get some clarity on all the different things you're working on.
▶️ [10:08] I think there are so many steps as we've talked about earlier, there are so many steps even with a single client that I think on day one you need a way to track what's happening. Even if you start with a simple Excel spreadsheet, that's fine. So you could start with this and then as soon as you have to collaborate with someone, even an assistant you need to have a system. And an Excel spreadsheet is usually not enough to collaborate. In those cases, you need a way to be able to discuss specific topics. You can't send each other emails because it's gonna be too hard to manage. So I think before 20 to 30 clients, you can probably do everything with Excel, and then it's probably better to have something else to get automated reminders and automation and things like this to help you streamline. And if you have 30 clients, that's probably because you actually talked to like 200 leads. That's right. So that means you have like 230 people to manage. So you probably need a tool even before having 20 or 30 clients.
▶️ [13:46] Yeah, definitely. So in our case, each piece of content is a task and each publication of that content is a task as well. So for a specific topic, for example, this podcast once it's released, it'll be a task. And the fact that I will talk about this on YouTube will be another task on LinkedIn will be another task, et cetera, et cetera. Because each task has an assignee, which will be the person doing the publication a date, which will be the publication date. And potentially we might want to use the comments to discuss how to publish this on YouTube and do something specifically for YouTube. So we try to split things into having different tasks even for the same topic.
▶️ [16:11] I think again, it's content just putting content out there and really showing the way we work, what are our values and how we think. And I think creating content, that's the ultimate way of doing this. And again, people come to us, they know exactly the way we operate because they've seen us talking about the way we work on YouTube. They've seen webinars of us talking. They've read our books. So it changes the whole discussion. It's not about "Please show me why you're the best", it's about "I wanna work with you, when can we start? And here's the scope of what we need."