All Posts by Chris

How to Find Entertainment in Your Offer

Beware the f-word!  It’s odd how rarely fun or entertainment features as part of an offer despite frequent references to fun in business circles.

What is It?

Perhaps for some people, fun diverts from serious matters.  Whether a welcome diversion or to be avoided at all costs, fun is definitely secondary.

However, to claim something serious is fun or entertaining in some way attracts more people.  They don’t want to be bored and no matter how important the topic, to make it palatable is no bad thing.

Fun or entertainment has intrinsic value.  It’s an opportunity to take a break, try something new and relax.  Done with others it enhances relationships and perhaps defuses antagonism.

Value to the Client

Fun may be memorable.  To what extent does fun, where it engages attention, help people remember important stuff?

Getting away from the familiar helps strategic planning or team building.  Sometimes when we engage with the unfamiliar, we find new insights spontaneously come to our attention.  Fun has utility.

So, fun helps us to

How to Get There

For coaches fun may be a means to an end.  It is rarely an end in itself.  If clients enjoy coaching sessions or training, they are likely to benefit more and return for more.

How do you market the fun element; convey fun without undermining seriousness of purpose?

Some things are enjoyable without being fun.  For example, a therapeutic massage may be enjoyed but we would not describe it as fun.  Clients might enjoy learning a new skill through hard work.

Your Offer

Most important is benefits to the client.  If you promise they’ll enjoy picking up benefits, all well and good.  Ask for testimonials that say they enjoyed working with you or even had fun.

This is the fifteenth of 31 posts about elements of value.  Make sure you don’t miss any by signing up for the offer below.  The posts in this sequence can be accessed below:

From Sales Funnel to Hourglass

We’ve all heard about sales funnels and how we all have one or need one.  What does this mean, especially when starting out?

Attention Costs

Getting someone’s attention has a cost attached to it.  This is the brutal truth about business.  You have no chance of selling unless the right people pay attention.

The first thing to be aware of is costs.  Your sales must exceed costs.  Sales are easy to calculate.  However, be aware that once you have a customer, they may make more than one purchase.  So, they may have a Lifetime Value beyond your first sale.

So what are the costs?

Costs are in money and time.  Your time has value and if you put a lot of time into meeting prospects, this impacts business success.

How many steps are there between first contact and first sale?  Each step increases costs.  I normally first encounter people through networking or speaking.  I meet interested people over coffee and usually sell at that stage.  Some funnels have four or more stages and each stage adds to costs.

With a financial value to the initial cost that brings prospects into your funnel, you can calculate the overall cost of turning a prospect into a customer.  If that is less than the lifetime value of the customer, you have a business.

I’ll share some of the calculations below.  For beginners these calculations are something to be aware of but not necessarily to worry about at the stage you are at.

Your focus is on developing offers you can sell and learning how to sell them.  You need to practice selling and so a funnel with minimal steps and low success rate is what you would expect at the start.  As success increases, so will your capacity and funnel calculations become more important.

Your Funnel

1. Every business has a funnel although not every business is aware of it. So, can you describe your funnel?  How many steps must a prospect pass through before they become a customer?  What are the steps?
2. Have you any idea of the lifetime value of your customers? Do they buy once or are they likely to come back for more?
3. How likely are your customers to pass on the word to other prospects? How much of your funnel do these prospects pass through?

Calculating Costs

To make meaningful calculations, you need experience.  You need to monitor prospects and costs.  If you monitor from the start, it helps.  But it is unlikely your practices will be the same once you are established.  Early stages are likely to involve a lot of chopping and changing, so you may find these calculations make more sense once your business works to a regular pattern.

However, it is helpful to be aware of what’s going on beneath the surface, even if you don’t have monitoring in place.

You need some idea of the cost of getting someone into your funnel.  Sometimes this is straightforward, eg a pay-per-click ad has a clear cost for each click.  If you speak at an event and 10 people sign up, it is the cost of preparing for the event divided by 10.

Let’s say the cost of one person entering your funnel is £5.  Estimate the percentage of people who move to the next stage of the funnel.  Say 5 of the 10 people who sign up attend your one to one.  And 2 buy your offer.  So, 50% turn up and 40% sign up.

You divide £5 by .5 and then by .4 and this means the cost of your customer is £25.  This is actually a reasonable cost and many businesses would be envious.  What happens if the cost is £5000 or more?

Mitigating Costs

Two things mitigate costs.  The first is lifetime value.  If customers make further purchases they may exceed the initial cost over time.  This works better for some businesses than others.  It is always worth asking what else you can offer a customer who trusts you.

Second, a satisfied customer may tell their friends and this can slash the cost of your funnel, especially if customers enter your funnel towards the end and are more likely to buy because of the recommendation.

If this happens often, you have an hourglass, where as many enter your funnel towards the end as enter from the top.

Following this thirty-first 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.

How to Market Therapeutic Value

In my last post about Elements of Value, I described the value of well-being.  Perhaps a more obvious value is where health–related offers have therapeutic value.

What is It?

The focus here is not so much the value of well-being in support of other activities, as curing or relieving medical conditions.

Therapy should be provided by trained medical practitioners.  Many work independently of the health service.  For example, someone using massage to treat sports injury can practice independently.  If you pay for treatment privately, it is reasonable to ask about qualifications and accountability.

So, this heading covers a multitude of alternative therapies, eg hypnosis or homeopathy.

Sometimes therapy and well-being are closely related.  Stress coaching includes aspects of well-being, eg resilience coaching but can be therapeutic for acute stress.

Many products are therapeutic, eg clothing, food and drink, prosthetics, various aids.

Value to the Client

This is fairly straightforward.  Cure of acute conditions, eg sports injuries and mitigation of chronic conditions.

Remember there are other benefits.  Mitigation of a chronic condition has a major impact on the client’s comfort, relationships, effectiveness and prowess.  The value can be far greater than immediate relief of pain or disfigurement.

How to Get There

Probably a more important aspect of this element of value is providing evidence you are qualified to treat the condition.  Show you are qualified, accountable and effective:

Similar questions apply for products.

Your Offer

Remember to focus on the benefits of using your service.  Chronic conditions can last for years and people become accustomed to them.  What are the benefits of taking up your offer?

It is worth focusing on a single condition so prospects who search for you see clearly you have helped people with the same condition.  Sell the benefits and not the service.  If I have heard hypnotherapy helps people give up smoking, when I see the word I may not associate it with weight loss.  So, to engage my interest tell me what you treat and not so much about how you do it!

This is the fourteenth of 31 posts about elements of value.  Make sure you don’t miss any by signing up for the offer below.  The posts in this sequence can be accessed below:

Finding Your Place in the Long Tail

Think about keywords.  These are terms people search for online.  Take the most popular keyword and place it first in line and then the next most popular and so on.  You will generate a curve which starts with very high numbers and quickly declines and tails off.  Obviously, the tail is massively long because of unlimited possible keywords.  Marketers call this the long tail.

History of the Long Tail

The same applied in the 1960s and 1970s.  Supermarkets came onto the scene and opened up shelf space to a range of products.  They could accommodate more than corner shops but shelves were finite.  They held a few products from the short head and very few from the long tail.

If you were in the long tail, your only option was to market locally.  You could try a market stall or door-to-door or even open a specialist shop.

With the Internet, the world changed.  Shelf-space online is infinite.  Amazon can always add more books.  However, there are only so many slots for businesses that accommodate everything.

How much impact does the Internet have on local businesses?  It increases opportunities for small businesses and some have a global reach.  By small business, I don’t mean to imply turnover is small.  A few do very well with a few staff from a single office anywhere in the world.

This leaves local businesses with pretty much the same challenges they had in the past.  Whilst the Internet can help them, for many it is a distraction.

Finding Your Short Head

1. What is the problem your product or service solves?
2. What restrictions do you impose on your market? (Sometimes called your niche, this is likely to be geographical plus perhaps demographics such as age or sex.)
3. Are you aware of fundamental beliefs you hold, likely to attract like-minded people?

Strategies in the Long Tail

No local traders dominate a sector of the market to embrace the long tail in its entirety.  Big business dominates the most popular products and services.

You need strategies that help you develop a short head inside the long tail.  Identify and build your own market, using whatever skills you have.  There are people out there who need your offer but they don’t know they need it or that you can meet their need.

Prices

First, don’t be deterred by the success of others.  The very best are likely to charge very high prices.    Remember these are small businesses with low capacity.

Keep your prices below the market leader’s and you can increase your prices. Then you may find a niche with those who cannot afford the market leaders.  Resist the temptation to lower your prices to undercut your competitors.  This results in a race to the bottom and hurts everyone’s business.

If you need to build your reputation, don’t expect your prices to meet those of the market leader.  The market leader is likely to have overheads you don’t have at the start of your business.

Collaboration

There is another reason you should not lower prices.  Aim not to undercut but to collaborate.  There are many opportunities and the main barrier is to think of competitors as rivals.  If they have done their work, they have a clear offer, a market and worldview different from yours.  Working with people in similar businesses can be beneficial because together you can raise awareness of the problem you solve and perhaps offer joint packages, more effective than working alone.

Following this thirtieth 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.

Marketing Physical and Mental Well-Being

Physical and mental well-being is important and integrates into a range of packages.

What is It?

Some offers are primarily about well-being, whilst other packages integrate with aspects of well-being.

For example, a health practitioner offers outdoor activities to businesses for team building and strategic planning. This business moves from health to business services.  The offer combines business objectives with an opportunity to enjoy the outdoors, learn new skills and experience something other than sitting at a desk.

Other coaches offer walking days or half-days to their clients.  Walking improves physical health and it is an opportunity to reflect at a deep level.

Here are a few well-being related things businesses offer clients:

Value for the Client

Where someone is stuck, health can be a reason.  Chronic conditions creep up on people, particularly where they spend a lot of time sitting.

To take part in healthy activity is not just an adjunct to the serious business in hand.  Go out of the office, sit in a training session and apart from the walls, little is different.

Physical exercise helps reach for insights that do not come to someone following their daily routine.  In other words, physical activities are not just enjoyable, they are the point.  Many people can’t solve their problems because they don’t keep themselves healthy!

How to Get There

Many people understand this and seek offers that incorporate healthy activity.  Others are not so keen.  So, understand the connections between health and problem solving and show how your activities help clients meet their goals, whatever they are.

Your Offer

Be clear about what you offer.  It might be some aspect of physical and mental well-being.  On the other hand, you may use the same methods as a part of coaching to solve apparently unrelated problem.

This is the thirteenth of 31 posts about elements of value.  Make sure you don’t miss any by signing up for the offer below.  The posts in this sequence can be accessed below:

Why Focus on Early Adopters?

Some time ago I wrote about Innovation Diffusion.  A new offer enters the market through early adopters and from there diffuses into the wider population.

The Rogers Curve

The shape of the Rogers Curve is the normal curve.  To understand diffusing new ideas or products into the population, you can divide it into three parts (or more).  The left hand side starts with a small percentage of people who are early adopters, they thrive on innovation.

The mirror image on the other side are the laggards who adopt late or possibly never.  The approximately 93% in the middle buy only what is tried and tested.

The temptation is to market to the middle but they are hard to reach because they are committed to their current suppliers.

Early adopters for your product, service or cause are a unique group of people.  If you sell a new software product, you attract a group of people whose tastes in food are mainstream despite their interest in your software.  You seek the enthusiasts for whatever you sell.

Why?  Because there is a chasm between early adopters and the rest.  To cross over to the mainstream is difficult, unless the mainstream get a message from early adopters that it’s worth a try.

How to Find Your Early Adopters

1. What do your early adopters want and what do they expect from you?
2. Where can you find them, in-person or online?
3. How do they differ from the early mainstream?

Crossing the Chasm

If you do cross the chasm, bear in mind you must be prepared.  With early adopters you work with small numbers of customers.  Many businesses fail when they find they cannot cope with hundreds or thousands of customers.  Capacity is possibly your biggest issue at this stage of business development.

Also, expectations are very different.  Your mainstream customers are less interested in innovation and strongly drawn to reliability.

So, do you want to cross the chasm?  If the market overall is large, you may find your business thrives with the early adopters alone.  This is especially true if your early adopters are wealthy enough to buy high-end products.

Plan your business development with the chasm in mind.  You can be viable among early adopters or among the majority but your strategy depends on which you choose.

Following this twenty-ninth 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.

How Badge Value Conveys Status

Status is why prospects accept or refuse your offer.  The problem is, for most offers, it is not obvious to third parties the customer has experienced the offer.  Perhaps they need something with badge value.

What is It?

Some years ago a colleague, who was a development worker in a neighbouring town, organised a community garden.  People in the town volunteered to help build the garden.  They included children.  So, my colleague designed certificates for the children.  She was nonplussed when the adults complained they had not received a certificate.

The certificate showed they helped.  They had no other evidence of their involvement and they had bought into the value of the project.

Branding has badge value.  There is something about designer clothing those in the know recognise.  The problem is how do you show you have done something if it is not visible?

You go on a course and receive a certificate but perhaps a badge you can add to a website helps?  Or with a client from a well-known business or organisation, can you show their logo on your website?

Testimonials and blurbs have badge value.  The fact they are there is effective, even if people don’t read them.

Value for the Client

There are two things to consider here.  Do you need a badge to offer clients to show they have completed your coaching or consultancy?  This can double as a promotional tool.

Or you may help your client find the badge they need to promote their business.

How to Get There

There are many types of badge and your particular circumstances help you choose which is best.

• The badge may be integral to your offer, eg a hairstyle.
• Designer labels
• Actual badges to pin on clothing
• Certificates
• Articles in printed media, which can be used to promote your business, eg in a restaurant window
• Badges on websites and social media
• Logos and designs
• Carrier bags are perhaps no longer a good ideas but bags for life can show allegiance to a particular store or supplier.
• Group photos can be circulated on social media.

Your Offer

Bear in mind a badge for your customers may serve as publicity for your business.  Also, some customers may not want a badge, eg customers being coached for some reason they find embarrassing.

So, ask permission where the badge is not integral to your offer.  Where customers experience embarrassment, try suggesting they help others by “paying it forward”.

Offer something customers are proud to be a part of so that wearing the badge is a genuine increase on status.

This is the twelfth of 31 posts about elements of value.  Make sure you don’t miss any by signing up for the offer below.  The posts in this sequence can be accessed below:

• Social impact: Self-transcendence
• Life Changing: Provide Hope, Self-Actualisation, Motivation, Heirloom, Affiliation and Belonging
• Emotional: Reduces Anxiety, Rewards Me, Nostalgia, Design / Aesthetics, Badge Value

Next:  Wellness + 4 more

• Functional: 14

Epidemiology and the Spread of Ideas

Last time, I wrote about the spread of ideas and especially how your customers talk about your offers.  This post explores the spread of ideas at a deeper level. How do insights from epidemiology help?

If you want to get ahead …

Way back, the most successful UK advertising campaign took the country by storm.    Everyone quoted a slogan produced by the Hat Council: “if you want to get ahead, get a hat”.  The slogan appeared in printed media from the 1930s, into the 1940s.  Everyone was familiar with it and if you quoted the start everyone else would chorus the final phrase.  Over the lifetime of this slogan, hat sales declined.

This story illustrates the power of a well-turned phrase and that such a phrase does not necessarily increase sales!  Today with the Internet ideas, phrases, videos, etc go viral and as such their originators cannot control them.

If you succeed in getting something passed onto millions, you cannot predict how they will use it.  Certainly, such a phrase could raise several boats, possibly not including your own.

It is more helpful if you get your message circulating among your market.  Satisfied customers  may be willing to spread a good idea, which effectively communicated might go beyond your customers so that you build a tribe of supporters.

Spreading the Word

1. What is it about your idea that gets people to tell others about it?
2. Who is likely to spread it and in what context?
3. What changes could you make to your idea or context that will make people more likely to pass it on?

Insights from Epidemiology

How do parasites, viruses and bacteria spread from host to host?  This study is known as epidemiology and it offers some insights into the spread of ideas.  The parallels are not absolute because the organisms spread tend to remain the same.  The organism that changes as it spreads runs the risk of changing to such an extent it becomes less effective at spreading.

Ideas are more malleable and subject to interpretation.   Arguably, it is playing with ideas that makes us human.  Online, a video may pass unscathed but even so the further it travels the more likely it is to be interpreted in new ways.

In epidemiology, R0 measures the spread of disease.  R0=1 means everyone who catches the disease passes it on to one other person.  R0>1 means the disease will on average spread to more than one person.  R0<1 means the disease passes to fewer than 1 person; it will soon die out.

Most ideas including your offers, have R0=0.  This is the fundamental problem we all face in marketing.  Remember this is not about whether the idea is a good one.  It is about how successful you are at spreading it.

Ideas must be remarkable to spread, how can you make it happen?

Following this twenty-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.

Design or Aesthetics?

It is easy to think design and aesthetics are the same, indeed Bain implies as much.  I think it’s important to distinguish between them.  You need to understand which you are talking about: design or aesthetics?

What are They?

Design and aesthetics occupy opposite dimensions of effectiveness and creativity.

Design should answer the question: does this do what it is designed to do efficiently and effectively?  The question is primarily functional.    If it doesn’t then it is not well-designed.

Aesthetics appreciates the beauty of the solution.  Does it look good?  Trousers serve many purposes, eg they cover the body, protect it from injury or cold.  They can also look smart or beautiful.

Here’s the deal: design and aesthetics support each other.  This is not an absolute, they don’t always.

An effective website does not have to look good.  Usually it is better if it looks good but it is not essential.  Furthermore, it does not have to look good to everyone.  Different groups have different aesthetics.

Value for the Client

To design something effective requires creativity.  The best designs look good and there is something satisfying when a well-designed solution is beautiful.  Aesthetics sell but only up to a point.  If the underlying design is poor, the product is discredited, however good it looks.

Aesthetics are packaging but they can be more than that.  Think of slimline TV screens.  Televisions used to be huge and heavy.  At the time they seemed to be the height of technological sophistication.  Now no-one would contemplate having one in their living room.  Modern TV screens do look better and take up less space.

We did not mind the old style because most of us did not think about what a TV screen might be.  That is the job of the designer who seeks something effective and aesthetically pleasing.

How to Get There

Design principles apply as much to services as they do to products.  A well-designed service delivers its promise on time.  Aesthetics apply to the marketing of the service, sometimes the right image is not easy to find.

If you are a designer, then delivering an attractive product that works is your brief.  But coaches must help their clients understand design principles for their product or service.

Whether as a prelude to employing a designer or something the client does themselves; the client must understand the principles beneath their design and aesthetics.

None of this is easy but done well, it is effective.

Your Offer

So, designer or coach conveys why understanding what is good design and good aesthetics is important.  To engage a designer you must define what you want from them.  Work in partnership with the designer, if you want something that works.

Your offer may be to help with briefing a designer through deeper understanding of your client’s offer.

This is the eleventh of 31 posts about elements of value.  Make sure you don’t miss any by signing up for the offer below.  The posts in this sequence can be accessed below:

• Social impact: Self-transcendence
• Life Changing: Provide Hope, Self-Actualisation, Motivation, Heirloom, Affiliation and Belonging
• Emotional: Reduces Anxiety, Rewards Me, Nostalgia, Design / Aesthetics

Next:  Badge Value

+ 5 more

• Functional: 14

Don’t Talk About Your Business!

Is that right?   If you don’t talk about your business, how is it possible to market it?

Getting People to Talk About Your Business

No-one likes a sales person; someone who goes on about their business and tries to sell to people who are not interested.

The challenge is to use marketing to get people talking about your business.  When others speak on your behalf, it lends credibility to your business.  Mostly, this happens in slow motion, through testimonials.  But imagine people so excited about your offer, they freely discuss it with their friends.  This is hard to achieve but good marketing aims to do this, eg through networking or email lists.

Talking about your business may be out-of-bounds but you can talk about other things.  And other things can be your strategy to get others talking about your business.  Aim to get others talking and you are unlikely to come across as salesy.

Aim to get people excited about something.  Make sure your talking is considered and clear about what you want from people.  Maybe something visual will stick in peoples’ minds.

Perhaps the most effective way is to deliver something of such high quality, people naturally tell their friends about it.  These customers are satisfied.  It is harder to impress people who have not experienced your services.  But not impossible.

Talking About Your Business

1. What do you do that gets people to naturally talk about your business?
2. How do your customers benefit from talking about your business?
3. How do people who are not customers understand your business? Why should they talk about it?

Dig Deeper into Why People Talk

Some businesses and organisations naturally open up into conversations.  Someone who has a new hairstyle is much more likely to talk about it than someone who has had a massage.  Here the topic of conversation is integral to the product or service.  When people see something they are likely to ask about it.

Paying it Forward

The real challenge is getting conversations started when there is nothing to see.  Perhaps some businesses find it hard to get people talking.  For example, someone counselled for alcoholism is unlikely to talk about it.  But then again Alcoholics Anonymous is good at getting clients to talk about it – paying it forward is part of their internal discipline.

Social Pressure

This last example, illustrates another reason people talk, through social pressure.  The AA does this through generosity, its culture encourages members to be generous and spread the word.  Other examples include network marketing and some religions encourage evangelism.  Personally, I find this approach difficult but I know people in network marketing who thrive on it.

Self-Interest

A third reason people talk about you is because it furthers their goals, at least in the short-term.  You might offer an incentive.  Other reasons might include it is something they believe in and want to promote, it helps them meet a goal or contribute to something they support or it might help them make money.  There are many more such incentives. Listen to customers and prospects carefully to work out what might get them talking about your business.

Following this twenty-seventh post to encourage coaches to think about 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.