407 - Troy Dean on How To Focus Your Marketing and Speak Your Client's Language

Live In The Feast

Today’s guest is Troy Dean. Troy is a podcaster, speaker, father, and the founder of WP Elevation. Through WP Elevation, Troy helps WordPress consultants build and scale their businesses.

A self-proclaimed “horrible passenger,” Troy started his own business because he wanted to be in control of his financial future, though the actual events leading to WP Elevation were a bit erratic.

After wandering a bit aimlessly in his 20s, Troy stumbled into voice-over work and built a website to promote himself. People liked the site and started asking him to build one for them, thus beginning his entrepreneurial journey.

One of Troy’s strengths as a business owner is getting to the heart of what his clients truly need. Over the years he’s developed a framework designed to elicit that information and better understand what’s most important.

Troy now trains other WordPress developers and designers on how to build their business by niching down and getting really good at client communication through his mastermind group and training courses.

Troy is currently working on expanding his audience to other freelancers without abandoning his core audience of WordPress developers, while also putting a big emphasis on live events and testing his training.

In this episode Troy talks about:

• The delicate balance between being creative, delivering for clients, and managing the relationship.
• Asking clients questions and going deep and wide on the responses.
• Creating your value proposition, being bold, and having a unique stance in the market.

Main Takeaways

• One of the best value adds you can deliver for clients is to help them better understand what they need, which may not be the same as what they think they want.
• Learning to speak your client’s language is an essential way to let them know you are truly listening and have their best interests in mind.
• If you don’t niche down and find a market on which to focus, you end up constantly taking broad strokes and trying to please everyone all the time, which never works out well.

Important Mentions in this Episode

• WP Elevation
• Brendon Burchard
• Dan Kennedy
• Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Troy’s Proposal Template
• Troy on Twitter
• Digital Mavericks Facebook Group