Over the years, I have worked with several clients to ramp up their content strategy and some of them were pretty big too, but I have never communicated to them via video meeting until recently.
Recently, I wrote a case study of a client that I worked with to bring tens of thousands of visitors to their site and published it on my blog as well on Reddit in r/SEO which got a decent response. I received a few emails and Reddit DMs too, some people were asking some questions and some wanted to work with me.
A message that stood out was from a US-based company that made animated 2D and 3D explainer videos for SaaS businesses. See the message by yourself, shouldn’t I find it flattering?
I replied, and we started exchanging emails about their requirements and how I can help them skyrocket their content strategy. We agreed to an online meeting in Zoom to discuss things further.
To be honest, it was my first video meeting with a client, I had only worked via emails and audio calls earlier. So, you can assume that I would be very anxious and afraid during the calls, and that’s exactly what happened. There were two guys from the company in the meeting that made me even more nervous.
I couldn’t make my points clear and couldn’t express how I would help them, even though I was very sure that my content strategy would be 10x (at least) better than their current one. But somehow I managed to survive the meeting, I thought that I did somehow good in the meeting.
In the meeting, the guy asked me to send a detailed email about what I will exactly be doing along with the prices. I did that but did not hear back from him for the next 4 days.
On the 5th day, I send him an email saying, “it’s okay that the pitch wasn’t convincing enough but could you provide me with feedback on what went wrong?” and guess what he did reply with a really long email.
What a nice guy!
He pointed out all the mistakes that I made and explained how I should have done everything. The guy clearly said that the video meeting was the reason they are not going with me, even though they were pretty impressed with the case study and the pitch that I sent.
And, then I understood how important being a good communicator is!
Even if you offer a great service that no one else can match up to the level, people will go for it only if you’re able to communicate with them properly. Having good communication skills is not a representation of the quality of services you provide, but it’s the way how people see it.
I think that I have decent writing skills but terrible speaking skills (in English), especially during video meetings, and that’s not good.
I have started to work on my speaking skills — practicing every day with some of my intellectual friends.
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