The Design Business Show 137: Showing Your Clients Love Throughout Their Journey with Alyssa “Twist” Light

Alyssa “Twist” Light is a professional speaker who helps businesses grow by utilizing the power of storytelling in every aspect of their operations, especially marketing.

She does it on the spot. Right there. With business owners and sales people she’s never met before, Twist asks a few questions and like magic comes up with marketing design, hashtags, positioning, value props, and branding. Her most recent success outside of her speaking work is Social Innovation Monthly, an offline subscription of social media “recipe cards” that help businesses engage in more powerful and consistent storytelling.

Twist has spoken at Landscape Ontario’s Congress, Ontario Irrigation Conference, CreativFestival, Halton Police Service, Go Camp Pro, Social Tenacity, HortEast, and the Ontario Camp Association among others. A self proclaimed lover of conferences, Twist’s mission is to make event planners look like superheroes and delegates feel like rockstars.

She has also been a guest on dozens of podcasts, including The 6 Figure Events Podcast, Authentic Influencer, Service Business Mastery, and Podcast Domination.

Here’s what we covered on the episode:

Why Client Love Is Important + How It Can Help Your Business (1:07)

We originally met Twist on episode 122 of podcast, which was all about telling better stories ― today’s follow up episode is about the client love journey
Twist says loving on your clients all the way through their journey is a huge part of the story
If you have a small offer, maybe it’s a workshop, Twist suggests getting addresses of those who attended and sending a card in the mail that says, “So glad you joined us” because little things like that build relationships
Twist shares an example of when she spoke for an organization called Landscape Ontario over a webinar where they couldn’t see her and she couldn’t see them, but they were all chatting about the things had sent them in the mail
How Twist gave an in-person speech for the same organization a few years earlier where she collected business cards with mailing addresses and when she traveled to England that year she sent all those people she had collected business cards from a postcard
By sending postcards, it deepened Twist’s relationship with them and also deepened their story with her and Landscape Ontario, who had her speak
When we appreciate clients in a way that matters to them, they start talking and that love turns into marketing
You should be sending cards, experiences or something to your clients regardless of your offer is a small or big
The time Twist received an experience gift for helping out at her friends mastermind retreat, which was not planned so her friend sent her an escape room game and she shares she’ll never forget the experience of playing that game with her family
Why you should pay close attention to what your clients like to do, what’s important to them and who’s important to them because if you know these things, you’ll be able to send them something meaningful

What Twist’s Doing In Her Business + Examples of Client Love (11:13)

Twist is currently doing virtual gigs and shares she just started with one of the best speaking agents in the business so she’ll be doing more online speaking in the coming months
On the last episode, Twist talked about how her business created course enhancing assets but says now what they’re doing is complete course builds for people and businesses that have an idea but don’t have the people or time to make a finished product they can sell
How they build the entire framework for the course in 24 hours, come back to the client ask for their input and then they create the whole course for them ― they do everything, right down to putting it into their software system
Twist clarifies that they are not selling the course for clients, they will do the messaging, marketing, positioning, start building out their social and design sales pages, etc. but the client needs to be the front piece when it comes to selling
Twist shares that everything they’ve done up until this point has been from referrals or rebooking and shares she doesn’t put out any organic content, but that may change because they’re working on putting out some great workshops
One of the biggest things we need to consider is how people want to be treated and we can answer that by thinking about how we want to be treated, this goes for your clients and team because how you treat your team is how they’re going to treat your clients
Why Twist starts her weekly team meetings by asking her team what their win of the week was
There is a lot of simple ways to love up on people that cost no money, like sending an email when something great happens for them, when someone has a milestone in their family, if someone had a baby, or someone passed away ― doing something small to let them know you’re thinking about them goes a long way
Twist shares an example of when she purchased a magazine for the Landscape Ontario’s event planner’s kid based on a conversation they had about a topic her kid liked and says she was touched by the gift ― when Twist later asked her to be a reference for another speaking inquiry she was more than happy to tell them how Twist treated her and everyone else
Why Twist keeps in touch with participants from events she’s spoken at because when they are thinking about bringing in a speaker, they’ll most likely want the one who cares about their people and are more likely to refer her to other people
How Twist doesn’t do these things to get referrals, she does them because it’s the right thing to do because that’s how she shows people she cares, which is what they remember about and then she gets referrals and rebooked
If you give someone something that matters to you and not them, it means it’s not about them, it’s about you and it should never be about you
Connect with Twist on Facebook