Monthly Archives: October 2017

Marketing Your Implicit Promise

The real challenge to marketing your implicit promise is, how implicit should be?  You move from Otium to Negotium when you market.  The preparation you do as a private person, ready to invest in your client, is crucial.

Three Types of Consultancy

Let’s revise three approaches to consultancy.

1. The expert consultant is someone hired to solve a specific well-defined problem, eg a website designer. Expert consultants act as temporary staff members, contributing specialist skills.
2. Non-directive consultants – start from the assumption the client is the expert. I normally refer to them as coaches.  A coach draws out the expertise of the client.  These are people who listen their clients into free speech.
3. The hybrid coach, uses both coaching and expert consultancy. Usually, they help the client meet their objective as a coach and provide advice and guidance in the coach’s specialist area.

I guess most coaches are type three – hybrid coaches.  Their role as a coach is their implicit promise.  How implicit does their coaching promise have to be?

Marketing Your Implicit Promise

Coaches do not offer technical solutions.  Hybrid coaches need to be clear when they stop coaching and switch to teaching.  The challenge is to help the prospect understand the distinction.

The coach offers adaptive as opposed to technical change.  This means the coach helps their client change their behaviour.  Their aim is to name behaviours that prevent the client reaching their goals.

Changes in behaviour imply changes to the techniques the client uses to meet their goals.  Adaptive change drives technical change.  Many problems people encounter emerge when technical changes demand adaptive change.  This is why people find new techniques don’t work because they demand changes for which they are not prepared.

How do you market this?

You put the client in the driving seat.  Not only are they the expert in their business or life, they also drive the coaching.

It is their responsibility to choose what they discuss with coach, what they implement and how they implement it.  The coach may offer accountability but it is the client’s responsibility to make sure change happens.

I am not there to tell clients how to run their business or life.  My responsibility is to create the space wherein the client can share their thinking.  When we get it right my role as coach is to boost their thinking, help them go further, faster.

We may spend a lot of time rejecting possible approaches.  If the client has difficulty making decisions, we name barriers and seek ways to approach them.

My clients set the agenda for the meeting.  I create the space in which we discuss their agenda.  I might challenge the agenda, eg by asking why they want to discuss this topic.  But it is always the clients’ agenda.

I help the client by using my structure.  I have questions for the client between sessions.  These help the client name the issues to discuss next and help me understand the client’s perspective.

Where we need to discuss technical approaches, we may move to a more didactic approach.  I offer a done-with-you approach or recommend third-party support.

What the Client Needs to Know

The client needs to understand their problem.  I use an enrolment interview to help them.  Then we discuss whether I can help.

If we believe I can, I explain my approach.  Some people seek technical solutions and so are not interested.  For others, clarity about their business or life is more important than taking immediate action.  This is not to say they put action on hold until after the coaching.  Indeed, action is essential throughout the coaching.  It provides the raw material on which we can reflect together.

If this interests the client, we can discuss terms and conditions.

How to Recruit Clients to an Enrolment Meeting

This approach to marketing means you do not have to sell outside the enrolment meeting.  The aim of your marketing is to get consent to a meeting.

So, you use marketing to be creative any way that addresses your business purpose, using lifestyle choices to support your marketing.  The enrolment meeting has its own dynamic and the experience is different from the marketing campaign itself.

Let’s say you are a coach and a musician.  You could deploy your coaching skills to your marketing campaign.  This might be to offer an audience an experience that helps them understand your offer.

Alternatively, you might use your skills as a musician, even though your music might have little to do with your coaching.  Why do that?  The big advantage is it creates some distance between you and other similar coaches.  The trombone playing coach is likely to stand out!

Of course, there may be intermediate approaches you could take up, combining coaching and musical skills.  The aim is to be memorable and present yourself as a rounded human being; someone to know, like and trust.

To neglect your lifestyle aim is to lose a critical dimension to your business.

Visit my new website, Market Together to sign up to my list so that you don’t miss any posts and hear about the exciting plans I’m working on to promote an alternative approach to marketing.

Please comment and let me know what you like about this post.  What would you like me to write about further?

What do People Want?

Successful businesses are aware of the wants and needs of their market.  Broadly, wants are desired and needs are necessary.  The original Maslow’s triangle shows needs at the bottom, eg food, accommodation, safety and then spiritual values at the top.  What do people want?  As they become wealthier, people tend to move up the triangle.  You must fulfil each level before you move to the next.

Maslow’s Triangle for Businesses

You may be familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  The link goes to a version that applies what businesses supply to Maslow’s triangle.  The idea is once you complete a lower level, the needs kick in from the next.  So, it is something like this:

1. Functional needs – these are the technical fixes every business needs. Most marketing solutions are at this level.
2. Emotional needs – these are elements that enhance life by meeting immediate emotional needs.
3. Life changing needs – these are needs that meet aspirations, eg the changes that people need to make as they approach retirement
4. Social impact needs – this is about changes in the wider world.

I first encountered Maslow during the 1980s and I remember the story of a nun who, upon seeing the triangle for the first time, commented that it is upside-down.   Once you know your social impact needs you need to think in terms of the changes you need to make, then the emotional needs you need and finally your technical requirements.

It’s easy to focus on the functional and fail to ask why we need to function.  Too many businesses, community and political projects are efficient but not effective.  Motoring down the wrong road at speed is not about making meaningful progress.

What Does Your Market Need?

1. Think about your market and decide which level they primarily work at? For example, a financial adviser works mainly with people at the life changing level.
2. Now think about your business. What level do you major at?  Many marketers offer technical fixes at level 1 and yet their market may need adaptive fixes at level 3.
3. If your business straddles more than one level or needs to, what are the implications for your marketing?

How to Help People Work out What They Want

If your business majors at the functional end, you sell to anyone who rolls up and says they need your product or service.  Perhaps it is not in your interest to find out whether they need it.  That is unless at a later date they decide it does not work and complain.

A lot of online marketing depends on people who do not know what they need, opting for solutions that may be relevant but are not necessary.

Businesses that operate at higher levels are more likely to work out what their customers need.  The customer may not be ready for this but a skilled business owner guides them.  Your challenge is to work out where you are and how crucial to long-term success the way you package your offer is.

Cheaper products are not too crucial.  If someone finds it is not right for them, they can bear the loss.  Expensive products need more care in sales and after-care.  You want customers who use it successfully because your reputation is important.

Many businesses have a mixture of low-end and high-end products and use this business structure to build long-term relationships with their customers.

Following this eighth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

Your Business Offer of Yourself

Your business offer of  yourself?  When I discussed offers under business purpose and financial purpose, I considered offers of a vision and a service in exchange for money.  Here the offer is of yourself.

Whatever form of coaching you offer, there will be an implicit element that relates to your contribution as a coach and what is Otium for the client.

Lifestyle is never irrelevant and in a future post I shall write about the benefits to the customer of your lifestyle choices.  Your implicit offer is to pay full attention to your customers.  Business owners get few opportunities to talk at length about their business to someone ready to listen.

Paying Attention

The biggest challenge every coach faces is to listen actively.  The aim is to listen the customer into free speech.  To speak freely about their business, their life, whatever preoccupies them is of immense value.

You formulate questions that have never been asked and so move the client’s thinking into a new perspective.  The coach understands they are not an expert in their clients’ lives.  Indeed it is a disadvantage to have prior deep knowledge.  The coach is an expert in asking the questions that deepen the clients’ understanding of their own business or life.

Most people recycle ideas they pick up from elsewhere.  The word education at root means, to draw out. Coaches are educators par excellence because their aim is to free their clients’ speech.  Coaches free clients from the ideas of others so they arrive at a new place no-one has visited before.  Contrast this with the role of the trainer who plants new ideas into their clients’ heads.

With free speech, the speaker discovers

The listener when fresh and not preoccupied, responds to their client with the right questions.  Start with questions prepared in advance and then progress to questions in response to the reality of the clients’ responses.

Spending Time

The coach must be prepared with questions and with time.  Free speech cannot be rushed.  It takes at least 20 minutes to get to the point where someone speaks freely and after that there comes a point where stock is taken, conclusions drawn, action steps decided and agreed.

The coach does not normally take action steps for the client but will have some of their own; the steps to remember and work out how to build on what has gone before.  They need time and space to mull things over, remember key ideas and check the client remembers next time.

Preparation

You can see the important thing is preparation.  The coach turns up prepared and ready to listen, helping the client remember what went before.

Training assumes proven methods to be conveyed, understood and applied.  This can be creative but the bulk of the speaking is with the trainer.  It answers the question: How?  How can I do this?  How can I apply this to my business?

The coach helps the client answer the question: why?  Without a why there is no point in asking: how?  Most of what we do asks: How?  This is why so much does not work.  We literally do not understand what we are doing.

The trainer turns up with a programme and whilst flexible, they know where they are going.  The coach turns up with a few questions and an open mind.  They are ready to listen the client into their own reality.  They cannot do this when preoccupied, rushed, prejudiced, opinionated.

The coach then has an implicit promise to market.  How?  I’ll make some suggestions in my next post in this sequence.

Visit my new website, Market Together to sign up to my list so that you don’t miss any posts and hear about the exciting plans I’m working on to promote an alternative approach to marketing.

Please comment and let me know what you like about this post.  What would you like me to write about further?

Some Reasons to Always Be Testing

The key to successful marketing is imperfect action.  I subscribe to slow marketing but not so slow you never make any changes.  The key is to slow down thinking but act quickly and decisively.  So, you must always be testing; trying new things.

What Does Testing Mean?

Online marketing is full of opportunities to measure and test.  There are many testing tools available, eg Google Analytics.  Used properly these are helpful tools but not everything benefits from this approach.

The term “always be testing” applies to a more general approach.  Whenever you try something new, you should understand it is something you are testing.  Whatever action you take to get your offers into the world is a test.

This is a positive mindset.  The results of a test has value.  The fact something did not work, you lost money or looked a bit foolish, is all experience you use to improve your next offer.

Marketing methods are iterative, trial and error.  The alternative is to wait until you have a perfect offer and marketing campaign.  You will wait for a long time.   Trial and error is always faster.

Practical Risk Taking

1. Think about your life experience. When have you moved quickly with success?  Was it the success you expected or something new?
2. Think of all the reasons it is a good idea not to take the initiative. Look at them and ask: are these good enough reasons to not take action?
3. Is there anything in your life more important than your fear of taking action?

You and Your Fear

Perhaps the biggest fear coaches have is they are not good enough.  It is a big responsibility, helping someone overcome their fear.  Your fear could reinforce theirs and result in a terrible catastrophe.

Yeah.  So, you think you may be worse than you think you are?  Isn’t it possible you are better than you think you are?  Consider the possibility your problem is not fear so much as selfishness.

You are brilliant and want to keep your brilliance to yourself!  There may be people out there who suffer because you do not offer your services to them.  How can I possibly know that?  There is only one way to find out.

Following this seventh post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

How to Make Business at Leisure!

The Romans had two words to describe the relationship between home and working life: Otium and Negotium.  These delineate the relationship and help us answer the question: is it possible to make business at leisure?

This first post in a sequence about work-life balance, focuses on Otium and I shall consider Negotium in a future post.

What Do You Want?

Otium is often translated as leisure.  However, this is not a good translation because it separates home life from working life.  It is perhaps better translated as what happens in private in preparation for working life.

Another interpretation might be self-development.  This is closer but perhaps still misses the point.  Self-development is sometimes tied to work.  What training do I need to do my job properly?  This is important but I would argue it is Negotium – a part of your public life.

Otium is much more about accomplishments and experiences that make you the person you are and equip you with something to share.  From the business perspective the question is not so much what you need to do to meet the needs of your business as what you uniquely bring to your business.

For example, my background is in community development.  Now I offer coaching in marketing.  I occasionally get told by more experienced business people that this background is not professional enough.  Maybe there is some truth in this but actually, it is my life experience that adds value to my offer.

I have experiences to draw on, skills I have practiced over the years, which are of great value to my chosen business.  When you work in a situation where there are too few resources, you have to be resourceful.  Running a small business and community development are not that far apart.

Flourishing

So, the question becomes: what do I want from my life?  Imagine you have a rose-bush in your garden.  The worse possible outcome will be for the buds to wither and drop off.  What you want is the buds to open and the bush to flourish.

As a gardener you need to carry out various activities, eg feeding, watering, pruning, weeding to help the bush to flourish.  The same applies to life.

There are three dimensions to this in constant flux.

1. You need a cause, something to commit to, a change you want to see in the world. Your business is likely to be your main cause and so this is Negotium.
2. You need a vision of your own personal future, the person you wish to be. This may be a range of activities and interests that help you become this person.  This might include activities such as sport, hobbies, music, reading, religion, etc.
3. Your relationships, again moving towards the public. This includes family and friends but also things like public worship, political activities, etc.

However, there is a fourth dimension, serendipity (and of course its opposite, the unhappy accident).  Life throws up opportunities and disasters. Our triumphs and tragedies can all transform into something of value.

Formation

The Catholics call this experience formation and it has both dimensions – activities of our own choosing, disciplines, and those that we have to take in our stride.

Seen this way the boundaries between business and leisure are less clear then perhaps we believe.  The question becomes: is the aim of your life to achieve your business aim, your financial aim or your forgotten aim of becoming a human being fully alive?  Are all three possible?

We aim solely for financial success at our peril.  Many business owners understand their business aim is integral to financial success.  How many forget the human being at the heart of it?

The challenge is to unscramble what we want out of our lives and businesses.  This will be the topic of my next post: what is my business offer to myself?

Visit my new website, Market Together to sign up to my list so that you don’t miss any posts and hear about the exciting plans I’m working on to promote an alternative approach to marketing.

Please comment and let me know what you like about this post.  What would you like me to write about further?

Something to Remember when Positioning Yourself

Positioning yourself in the wrong way is easy.  Your focus needs to be on your market and their needs.  Forget your market and you position yourself according to what you enjoy doing or to distinguish yourself from your competitors.

Your Identity

The big challenge is not so much finding a position as maintaining a consistent identity once you take up the position.  Your market will not necessarily hear or understand you the first time.  Or the second!

This does not mean you have to say exactly the same thing every time but you need to deliver a coherent message over time.  Your offers evolve as your understanding of your market and its desires increases.  But your overall message to your market must remain consistent over time.

So, today is as good as any other to start delivering a consistent message to your market.

Questions about Your Position

1. How successful have you been in delivering a message that is both distinctive and consistent?
2. How does your message show empathy for your market?
3. Where you have a clear position, what are the opportunities for collaboration with competitors?

How to Focus on Your Market

Nothing beats knowing your market.  Make a list of their needs or desires.  Remember you are listing the needs of a particular market, not the needs of people in general.  Choose two of those needs and draw them as axes on a graph.

See if you can place yourself on these axes.  Where do your competitors fall on the graph?  Do you have a degree of separation?  Note your competitors aren’t really competing, they serve a different group of people.  If there is little or no separation, change one or both axes.

Find a couple of needs that give you separation from the rest of the marketplace.  Position yourself so that you stand out from the rest for a particular market.  Aim to get your message across to those people so they know you are addressing them and like what they hear.

Following this sixth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

Who Else Benefits from Financial Success?

You start with a financial vision, reflected in your pricing and marketing.  This results in benefits for your clients, your outputs.  But actually, your clients’ experience includes outcomes beyond immediate benefits.  The client who solves their immediate problem experiences improvements in the rest of their lives.  They join their vision to yours and see their vision realised as they improve their performance.  But who else benefits from financial success?

The real value of financial success is to see your business purpose realised through changes in the lives of people around you, your business outcomes.

Other Businesses

Your success inspires others, gives them hope.  These do not always become competitors.  If you increase prices, you are likely to need fewer clients and so there will be more people in the market than you can handle.

It is possible your success will increase the market.  Your response could include:

Your vision is important here.  You don’t want your market flooded with fly-by-night coaches who do not understand it and discredit your approach.  Supporting those interested in supporting your vision can result in greater expansion and benefits to all involved.

Investment

Investment is not limited to money.  With more money and time, you can invest in causes; into the vision behind your business.

Your reputation and expertise becomes valuable to others and various causes welcome association with your business.  In the early days you are likely to have credibility without being well-known.  You can choose what you support and present your credentials when you need to.

Should you invest for free?  Investment implies payback and I always advocate working out of self-interest;  remember the basic rule of mutuality: “I help myself when I help others.”  So, yes, by all means choose causes that support your business aims, including financially but remember generosity is your aim.

Family and Friends

Others who benefit from financial success are family and friends.  It’s not that you have more money to spend on them.  Your success is likely to be modest in the light of claims made by many marketers.  Remember the Pareto principle, 80% of the money made through business will be held by 20% of businesses.

This partly accounts for business failures.  However, you don’t have to be in the top 20% to be viable as a business.  Just aim for sustainability.

The value to family and friends is your presence, being there for them and not an absent benefactor.  Your aim is to find an equilibrium, where you balance work and lifestyle to be able to help others do so too.

This post brings my posts about the second, financial aim of businesses to a conclusion.  But it opens up the path for further exploration of your third lifestyle aim.

Visit my new website, Market Together to sign up to my list so that you don’t miss any posts and hear about the exciting plans I’m working on to promote an alternative approach to marketing.

Please comment and let me know what you like about this post.  What would you like me to write about further?

Use Positioning to Target Your Offer

A couple of weeks ago, I invited you to answer questions about your promise.  Last week we looked at empathy with people with different and similar worldviews.  This post is about positioning and relates to your niche.  Even if you are one of many making a similar promise, you can position yourself to distinguish your offer from all the others.

From the Old Things to the New

The aim of positioning is not to sell something new but to encourage your prospects to think about their problem in a new way.  This is not selling a new cure-all solution, so much as suggesting your prospects benefit from thinking about their problem in a different way.

For example, I provide coaching in local marketing.  Many marketers offer technical support, so their clients can learn and apply a new approach to their marketing.  I have opened a new position by arguing new technical methods are not always the answer.

So, does it help to think about marketing as self-expression, getting my unique message across, as opposed to competing directly with everyone else who shares the same offer, message and technique?

Seeing Things Differently

1. What is distinctive about your offer? What makes you stand out in the marketplace?
2. Complete this sentence about you and your competition: “The one thing that separates me from my competitors is …”
3. Think about your best clients. Why do they stick with you?  What could you change so that they stick with you?

Doing Things Differently

Consider making one change to your business that will position you in the marketplace.  Remember, if you open up a new position, there will always be people who prefer the old.  This is not a problem; so long as you have enough people who prefer your position, you have a business.

Following this fifth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

How Your Client Benefits from High Prices

Can you list benefits from high prices for your clients?  They boil down to how you structure your business.

Business Structure

How do you understand the way finance works for your business?  There are many possible financial objectives and your business may adopt several as it develops.  You can choose to maximise sales, revenue or profit, for example.  Your choice determines how you market your business.

So, when you estimate the money you need, decide the financial structure to meet that objective.  For example, if you seek maximum sales, you must increase traffic to your business and consider how quickly you convert as many as possible.

If you maximise revenue, seek clients who can afford your high-end offers. This may mean reduction in traffic and increased conversions.

Your clients receive a better service from you if you know what you are doing!

Their Confidence in You

When your client trusts you, they are more likely to share openly with you.  Price tells them how much you value your offer.  If they don’t think you value your offer, why should they trust you can help them?  Furthermore, if they see you as successful, you are likely to have inside information to help them be successful too.

This applies to all types of coaching.  Say you coach people for stress reduction.  If someone faces a crisis, they look for someone with a proven track record so they have confidence their coach can help them.  At a time of crisis they may want to meet more often or have access to their coach as things develop.  They will expect to pay more for this level of service.

The same applies for resilience coaching.  Someone in a responsible position wants a coach to equip them for the inevitable crises.  They expect to pay for an effective service.

It is easy to see why self-confidence is important.  If you do not believe you are worth a high price, how do you persuade your high-end clients you are worth hiring?  If you make a first offer of a high-end product, you can always downsell to a low-end product.  This establishes your worth and so long as the low-end product is clearly a lesser product, you establish your credibility.  Someone with fewer resources to commit can be reassured by the prices they cannot afford.

More Time

Your aim is to create more time for your clients as you increase prices.  With limited hours in the week, knowing how much you need to earn, work out how much you need to earn per hour.  Offer high-priced products and you need fewer clients and have more time to devote to each client.  This is true for both preparation and face-to-face time.

More Resources

With higher prices you have more resources to devote to your clients.  So long as you budget for resourcing your offers, there are many ways to improve your client experience:

Self-Confidence

Over confidence is a possible downside.  What happens if success goes to your head?  There is a species of arrogance, sometimes among successful coaches and consultants.  Many business owners see this and do not want to be perceived this way.

The main thing to remember is most people lack self-confidence.  Being under-confident is more likely to be your problem.  They ask: “What if I am not as good as I think I am?”  To which the obvious response is: “What if you are better than you think you are?”  It is possible low self-esteem deprives the world of your unique, valuable contribution.

Pricing is not the sole criterion for the successful entrepreneur; arguably it is the least important.  But reality dictates without sufficient income, other advantages of success are unlikely if not impossible.

Next time, I share ideas about other positive results from financial success, beyond satisfied customers.

Visit my new website, Market Together to sign up to my list so that you don’t miss any posts and hear about the exciting plans I’m working on to promote an alternative approach to marketing.

Please comment and let me know what you like about this post.  What would you like me to write about further?