All Posts by Chris

Moving from Theory to Praxis

The fifth movement for Intentional Business Development concerns the actions we take.  Many people spend time theorising and fail to act.  Others act without reflection on what they do.  Praxis is a balanced action reflection approach.

Learning and Discipleship

In religious traditions, students are called disciples.  The call to discipleship is a call to learning.  The same is just as important in business.

In business coaching means much the same thing.  Few operate at their best if they are not guided by those with more experience.  It’s not that the coach or mentor knows all the answers.  In fact, avoid those who claim to do so.  The best coaches know what to do when they don’t know the answer.

It’s all very well having a technical solution to a particular problem but knowing how to tackle the intractable problem is far more valuable.  These problems lead to new solutions that move everyone forward.

We Do Not Learn from Experience

We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflection upon experience and from passing on what we learn to others.

Many business people, myself included, have experienced being unable to launch something because they believe it is not good enough.  Let’s look at it this way.

Two business people have an offer that is 30% of the best it could be.  One launches it and the other delays a launch to spend more time improving it and gets it to 80%.  Who does best?

Actually, it is almost certainly the one who launches first.  You know if you don’t launch, you will earn nothing.  So, even if the offer is a bit rubbish the one who launches early may get a few clients.

But you might object – the other when they do launch, might do better with a better product.  But how likely is that in practice?  What if 100% is possible only with feedback?  The one who launches early may have a poorer product but they have the big advantage of feedback.

Maybe most of the feedback will be negative but that’s OK; it is all valuable information.  The one who launches can still work on their offer and chances are with feedback they’ll make more progress than the one who doesn’t.

Early Adopters

Ah yes, but what if someone buys the inferior product?  You have a number of options.  You could charge a low-priced early adopter fee.  This may be a little risky, if you label the offer somehow inferior.

But perhaps a better option is to make sure the early adopters do not fail.  Make sure you meet their expectations.  This way you not only avoid bad publicity but also learn in detail what the early adopters want from the offer.

If you reflect on experience, the chances are you will have a better offer that sells better too!

Lifelong Learning

In business, we learn all the time.  The best learning comes from launching offers.  This is how we learn and tweak our offers so they become excellent.

Intentional Business Development emerges from this stance.  When we have an end in sight and ready to put in the work to perfect it, we commit to lifelong learning.

You can improve most offers.  In need of improvement is their natural state.  It isn’t about bending to every whim of every customer but seeing how simple tweaks lead to improvements that appeal to prospects across the board.

It is about entering a pact with your customers so together you seek the best solutions.  Your client won’t want the same thing as you do but working together you can tread the same road and learn together for mutual benefit.

This is the sixth and final post in a short sequence about intentional business development.  It’s all a part of Market Together.  Sign up below so you don’t miss a post and visit my new website by following the link.

Using Leverage to Change What Your Prospect Wants

This post considers a very basic change.  Do you want to change how your clients get what they want or do you want to change what they want?  You need greater leverage to achieve the latter.

How or What?

Let’s take an artisan baker as an example.  In terms of marketing, are they changing how you get bread or what you buy as a staple?

There are far fewer outlets that sell artisan bread than outlets that sell bread.  Unless you live close by you have to go out of your way to buy the bread you want.  If you really like artisan bread and perhaps the increased status it implies, you may be willing to go out of your way to buy it.  But in general it is harder to persuade many people to change how they get their bread.

But maybe you can persuade people artisan bread is a different product that is desirable.  It tastes better, it is healthier, better for the environment and so on.

For the coach or consultant, the question is: are seeking to change people so they use you for their services, eg as a website designer you do the work for your customers?  Or are you seeking to change your customer in some way?

You can immediately see both approaches have pros and cons.  The former offers little distance from your competitors.  It may work well if you have some speciality.  Otherwise people will use whoever is most convenient to them.  The latter is harder than the former but if you can do it, people are likely to seek you out.  The more difficult the task, the better the tools you need to do it.

What do You Change?

1. So, which do you do? Change the way people get something or change what they want?
2. What would persuade you to take up an offer that would change what you want?
3. How do you market something that changes the way people think?

Leverage

One important thing to consider is, if you aim to make difficult changes to what your clients want, do you have the time and the resources you need to do this?  What about experience?  What do you need to be successful in what you aim to do?

Changing what your potential clients want is more difficult than changing how they get it and more rewarding.  So, on reflection which of the following works for you?  (Fill in the blanks!)

Following this sixteenth 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.

Moving from Cognitive to Behavioural Approaches

This fourth of five movements is about taking action.  Some commentators on marketing talk about shipping.  They don’t just mean wrapping parcels and sending them to their customers.  Shipping is about getting an offer into the market.  Coaching is not just in the mind, you need to embody behavioural approaches. The best idea in the world is no use at all if it is not in the marketplace.

Not Just Courses

It’s true, especially for coaches, when you start in business, however good you are at what you offer, it is never enough.  The skills you need to get people to pay for your offer are completely different from the skills you need to deliver it!

Businesses that deliver products are lucky because all they need is packaging and a stamp.  They still need to market their offer, of course but they can focus on their marketing.

Mostly a coach’s offer is harder to deliver and their marketing is on top of that.  Marketing requires very different skills to coaching.

So, you have done your training and qualified in coaching.  Now you discover you need a lot of other skills to make clear what you offer your market.  You soon discover what works in theory rarely works in the real world.

Body, Mind and Spirit

The thing about getting your offer out there is it requires a completely different skill set to delivering coaching.  It engages the whole person; mind, body and spirit.

Of course, coaching itself may be equally all-embracing but by then the focus is on the paying customer.  When marketing your focus is on how you present yourself to prospective clients.

So, it involves your body and how you present yourself.  It is first impressions.  To a degree, marketing is showmanship – you need to look and play the part.

It involves the mind in the sense you need to show something more than your offer.  One thing I find very common is a focus on features.  You have a method, you know it works and you want to tell the world about it.  However the world is not even remotely interested in your method.  The world will take interest when you offer something they actually want!  They need to see potential benefits.

And the whole needs to be embodied through spirit.  You must show the way and lead by example.  This is more than an academic exercise, you offer something life changing and that needs to be embodied in your practice.

The extra you need to show is your common cause.  A new client does not merely recieve your wisdom, they become a participant in your vision.  Your spirit points beyond you and the client to some agreed goal, something you can work on together.

Embodiment

So, your offer at some level is an offer of yourself.  Perhaps this is less true if your offer is a thing.  But if you seek sales, you need customers who buy into your enterprise.

Whilst sometimes, you seek complete commitment from the customer, usually there are limits.  But the point is you need coherence between all aspects of your offer and it is this congruence your customer buys.

They expect complete commitment from you, even though they may not commit to you to the same extent.   You offer a service and so must show you can deliver it.  You take the initiative, seek a good match and share your customer’s values.

The promise to the client is always they can do so much more with your help.

This is the fifth post in a short sequence about intentional business development.  It’s all a part of Market Together.  Sign up below so you don’t miss a post and visit my new website by following the link.

Marketing Through Status Roles

Here is something you rarely hear about from marketers!  Sales associate strongly with status roles.  This may not be immediately obvious but once you spot it, it is hard to see it any other way.

Class and Status

You may have heard the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses”.  It is worth considering for a moment.  It is an old phrase, from well before the Internet.

Marketers have been aware status roles are important from the earliest times.  It is something we are reluctant to own up to, especially in Britain where we have a lot of anxiety around class.

Class is important, however much we may deny it.  In the UK, we are subjects of a monarch, not citizens.  We still have gentry as well as new gentry, funding their way through investments and accumulation of wealth.

UK people are conscious of gradations of class and even if we don’t care to admit it, most of us are acutely attuned to signals that mark class.

The connections between class and status are complex.  A trade union leader for example may have high status and low-class.

What is important to marketing is our perception of our own status and how it can be enhanced.  I feel it myself, in my desire to do training and read books.

How Does Your Offer Address Status?

1. Can you think of times when you have made purchases to enhance your status, at least in your own eyes?
2. How are your offers likely to influence the status of your clients? Is this explicit or implicit?  To what extent might clients consider status when buying from you?
3. How could you change your offers to appeal to status change?

Status Roles and Ethics

That people consider status when making purchases is outside of your control.  We all do it (except perhaps a few saints, who being saints already have high status!)

Look, I want to be better than anyone else at what I do.  I want to be respected for my contribution.  When I am respected, I enhance my status.  I doubt there is anyone reading this post who can honestly say they don’t experience similar desires.  Some argue these are entirely legitimate aspirations.

Given status is important, how should a marketer react?  They need to be aware of status.  For some, a ruthless appeal to enhanced status increases sales and that’s that.  Coaches perhaps take a little more care.  Someone who hires a coach solely for reasons of status may not use the resulting opportunities in the most constructive way.  You see why the third question is important?  What are the implications of appealing solely to status and are you aware of the extent to which you do so?

Following this fifteenth 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.

Moving from Technical to Adaptive Solutions

Intentional businesses seek more than clients.  They promote real change in the world.  They may aim for change to a particular industry, eg to help people in the printing industry enjoy healthier lifestyles.  Or maybe to see their neighbourhood transformed.  So, they need both technical and adaptive solutions.

Technical and Adaptive Solutions

Businesses need both technical and adaptive solutions.  Mostly we depend upon technical solutions.  This is particularly true for marketing, where we have seen a massive increase in technical solutions, in recent years.  All businesses market and so the change for society is profound.

So let’s define terms:

Technical solutions:

The business world needs both technical and adaptive solutions.  Too often the claims of technical solutions drown out adaptive solutions.

Left Behind in a Changing World

Advocates of technical change often use the image of a toolbox.  Hunt around and you shall find the right tool for the job.  You have a flat tyre and so you need certain tools to replace the tyre.  There is some skill involved but after a few repetitions, you can become expert at replacing tyres.

But no matter how proficient you become at car maintenance, you will not find any way to cross a river in spate that has washed the bridge away.  Now you need an alternative means of transport.  Can you adapt to sailing a boat or flying a helicopter?

Technical solutions are efficient and when applied to the right problem, effective.  Without adaptive solutions, however, you are left with tools not appropriate to a changing world.  You discover new technical solutions through adaptive solutions.

Adaptive solutions are effective where they genuinely take into account the changes happening in their context.  Sometimes they take and apply a technical solution from another context.  As technical solutions develop, they open up possibilities for new applications.

Problems arise where you apply technical instead of adaptive solutions.  It is tempting to assume proven methods always work.  This is a real problem for businesses, who use off-the-shelf solutions, where innovation is called for.

Transformation

Intentional business development is about transformation.  We develop something new that transforms the context within which we operate.  Every business does this to some degree.  Where there is clear demand for a product that can be manufactured and distributed, maybe less so.  But for the coach or consultant, the chances are they offer something different, something that addresses issues where the market is not fully aware.

In marketing there are many technical solutions.  The problem is many people have no grounds for choosing one instead of another.  You don’t have to be around for long before you’re told you need to use a website, social media, seo, a sales funnel.

You may need some or all these but without understanding what you sell, what you want to achieve, the chances are these methods will not work for you.

Your clients seek transformation of some aspect of their lives.  They seek a solution to a unique problem.  When you sit down together the chances are there is no clear idea of where your work together will take you.  The clarion demands of the marketplace do not help.

This is the fourth post in a short sequence about intentional business development.  It’s all a part of Market Together.  Sign up below so you don’t miss a post and visit my new website by following the link.

Marketing Through Trust and Tension

We’ve all experienced marketing campaigns that aim to instil fear.  They communicate fear because the marketers are fearful themselves.  Panic selling creates panic buying, in the unlikely event it achieves anything.  Without fear the marketer introduces their market to trust and tension.

Trust, Tension and Action

To sell you need to build two things: trust and tension.  No-one buys from you if they do not trust you.  But equally they won’t buy if they do not experience some tension, something they need and feel they lack.

Ideally, you build tension as you build trust.  The tension part is an obligation on your part, if you offer something of real value.  If you know people benefit from your offer.

How do you build trust?  You cannot take action and build tension without trust.  Usually trust grows as you take action.  As you build tension in your audience, you build trust because you take action.

To build trust you take action

To take action you create tension

Taking Action

1. Think of a positive experience of marketing (it could be yours or anyone’s). How did they build tension between “That’s what I want” and “I don’t have it yet”?
2. How do you take action to create tension?
3. Why should people trust you?

Your Marketing Design

The tension between “That’s what I want” and “I don’t have it yet” is old-school marketing.  Our challenge is to build trust and tension but there is more to it.  You must design your marketing strategy to take into account things like:

Your aim is to change your market’s story.  You want people to view the status quo in a different way; to see your offer as an alternative to standard offers.  You seek to bring change.  Change requires action on your part and that action creates tension and builds trust.

Following this fourteenth 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 notice of events relating to story-led maketing.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can improve your marketing through storytelling.

Moving from Individual to Collaborative Business

I recently completed a series of posts about working in private (Otium) and public (Negotium).  This is different because it is a movement in how we understand business.  All business involves movement between private and public.  This post is about how we perceive business itself – is it for self-enrichment or enrichment of many?

Private and Public

It may be tempting, once you identify your business through discernment, to set out as a self-employed person to make your fortune.  Indeed, it may be essential.  Even if you can sustain outgoings exceeding income for a period, actually making a living is pressing.

This conspires to focus on self-interest at the expense of others; to miss the possibility that self-interest may be better served collaborating with others.

While discernment requires private contemplation (Otium), movement into public (Negotium) should naturally involve movement into collaboration with others.  It is not simply making an offer.  The sustainable approach is to enter into conversation with your market.

Your first step is to identify your market, which can be difficult.   Fortunately, you have competitors and they can show you the way.  Competitors offer similar products and services to yours.  Unless you offer something unique, you have competitors.   Your challenge is to find a market they are missing and enter into conversation with that market.

Your market and your competitors’ markets share the same problem.  You work together to increase awareness of the problem.  This is likely to increase the size of everyone’s target market.

Listening into Free Speech

Your next step is to enter conversation with your market.  You do this by meeting people who express interest in your offer, for a one-to-one.

The aim of this meeting is for both of you to hear what your prospect is saying.  This is really important for two reasons.

1. The prospect needs to articulate their problem. Most people live with their problems and never share them.  They hardly know what the problem is themselves.  They hear you speak or see your offer and it triggers recognition of their problem.  Now they seek a space where they can hear what they are saying.    This is free speech, not in the political sense of permission to speak in public but in the personal sense of voicing the problem.
2. Listen to what they say for two reasons. Their way of describing their problem helps you develop a solution that genuinely helps your market.  The more listening you do, the more likely it is you find solutions that have a better fit for your market.  The second reason is you may find this prospect has a better fit with one of your competitors.  Usually it is better to work with those who have a good fit and pass on those who do not.  This reduces the possibility of dissatisfied customers and enhances your profile in the business community.

I am because we are

We live in a Cartesian society.  You will remember the philosopher Descartes rationalised thinking through “I think therefore I am”.  This principle of modern philosophy is common ground for most thinkers today.

But what if it is not the entire story?  We experience formarion in language and culture by listening to others.  So, it is not a massive leap to see that we function at our best when we are intentionally part of some community.

The key to this movement is “listening” but telling (or selling) is modern business’s primary goal.  We need time in private to work on our offer of something different.  But when we move into the public sphere, our aim is to build community, if our business is to be intentional.

The point of intentional business is sustainability, building a community who help one another by doing business.  If we aim to make loads of money, we may succeed.  But what we succeed at is effectively reducing the money in circulation.

Together businesses can meet the needs of their markets.  In doing so, they create relationships that enable communities to flourish.  This needs to be the focus of the business-owner’s intention.  How do we create the spaces where businesses flourish and build community together?

This is the third post in a short sequence about intentional business development.  It’s all a part of Market Together.  Sign up below so you don’t miss a post and visit my new website by following the link.

Four Modes of Business Communication

When business-owners think about how to improve their marketing, they usually focus on products or services.  Marketing is more complex, covering many aspects of business and its context.  Here are four modes of communication to consider:

How do You Get the Word Out?

Imagine a graph with two axes.  They cross and so form four quadrants.  Each quadrant covers one of four different modes of communication.

The first axis – fixed versus variable costs

A fixed cost is not related to the number of people who use or encounter your offer.  So, if you write a book, the costs are the same (time and money) whether it is remaindered or a best seller!

Variable costs relate to the number of people who use them, an example would be pay-per-click ads.  Variable costs include things you must pay every time someone makes a purchase or shows interest.  So, if you hold an enrolment meeting and buy the coffees, that’s a variable cost.

The second axis – media versus user experience

This axis is about what you invest your costs in.  You can choose to invest in media; the businesses you pay to help you get your message out.  These include not only investments such as a photographer, website designer or video producer but support such as your ISP, website host, a conference venue, etc.

User experience is when you invest directly in the people in your market.  It is the money and time you invest in building your tribe and the quality of the service you deliver.

Using The Four Quadrants

Sketch the two axes on a sheet of paper and consider your recent marketing activity.  (Some activities inhabit more than one quadrant.  The aim is to help you think critically about your marketing, not to put everything into tidy categories.)

1. When you consider your recent marketing activities, do they fall mainly into one quadrant or are they distributed between all four? Or somewhere in-between?  What do you conclude about your marketing?
2. Consider what you know about your competitors’ marketing. Where do they fall on the four quadrants?  Are you using similar or different approaches to your competitors?
3. Taking all this into consideration, what new things might you try?

What are the Four Quadrants?

Media with Fixed Payments

These are products produced by professional media people.  The focus here is on publicity, how you get the message out using some medium, eg a video, website, advert, book.  The real challenge is content, if you are to invest in high fixed costs, it is essential to know you have good content.

User Experience with Fixed Payments

This focus is on your story, values and relationship with your customers.  This is something you prepare.  To build a tribe, you must offer something they value.  You may invest a lot of time listening before you act on what you hear.  The important dimension is your marketing design, so you know the message to get across in every situation.

Media with Variable Payments

This covers approaches such as pay-per-click ads.  Any activity where you target a particular group according to their demographics and psychographics.

User Experience with Variable Payments

The emphasis here is quality of service.  It is what you invest to make the user experience as positive as possible, so the message gets around by word of mouth.

You may find as your business grows you are active in all four quadrants because all deliver value for money.

Following this thirteenth 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.

Moving from Self-Centred to World-Centred Business

There are five movements in Intentional Business Development.  The first moves from self-centred to world-centred business.

Here and Now

The focus is upon here and now.  It is not about looking to some idealised past or a fantasy future.  There is no business in paradise.

Perhaps our greatest problem is solipsism; the belief I am my sole concern and the world revolves around me.  The traditional way to deal with this is to encourage focus on God, not self.  Solipsism assumes a primitive understanding God.  God, understood as a man above the clouds, is a childish image many carry into adult life.

The danger is we get bogged down in a debate about whether God exists. Perhaps it is better to seek common ground; appreciation of here and now.

Solipsism presumes some idealised past or future.  Take a popular idea “Make America Great Again”.  This slippery slogan can never deliver for these reasons.

When we turn attention inwards, we lose touch with reality, here and now.

Paying Attention

This is not to say we should avoid inner work.  Inner work avoids fantasies and teaches us to focus on here and now.  Religious traditions have many tools for this.  Prayer and meditation connect with what is real.

Let’s take it away from religion and strip paying attention down to basics.  What’s your relationship with silence?  Can you abide in stillness?  Listen to your breathing, feel the sensations in your body?

Are you adept at stilling thoughts?  Are you even aware of the clamour of your thoughts?

Do you reflect on your day or your life?  How do you express gratitude?

You can do this by keeping a daily journal where you note concerns, gratitude and anything else that’s on your mind.  Or take a walk and allow your thoughts space to develop in response to the reality around you.

Discernment

How do I know what is fantasy and what is reality?  The act of telling truth from self-deception is discernment.

If paradise is truly the place where all our needs are met, then we know there is no need for business or indeed any form of relationship.  This is why many religious people do not believe in paradise.  We have need of one another and it is reaching out to the other that makes lives worthwhile.

Business is one expression of that need we have for each other.  Business conducted with integrity is the glue that holds communities together.  It depends on relationships of trust, keeps money circulating and contributes to all those activities that cannot generate income themselves (eg health and social care) from its wealth.

When we contemplate the world around us, we discover the needs of our fellows and develop the products and services to meet them.  Of course we don’t get them right.  This is why small businesses are important.  They are the people willing to try something at their own risk.

Many factors lead to successful business but the key factor that underlies all the others is: Do we have a viable business?  A viable business is where through discernment a business-owner identifies a real need.  They may not be competent or they may be outmanoeuvred by competitors, who have more capacity but if it isn’t viable it won’t survive the long-term.

This is the second in a sequence about intentional business development.  It’s all a part of Market Together.  Sign up below so you don’t miss a post and visit my new website by following the link.

The Reasons People do not Choose You

This is the point.  Your marketing is effective when you take on board the reasons people do not choose you.

You’re in a Market Too!

It is easy to forget that as an entrepreneur, you are in a market too.  There will be marketers only too keen to sell you their method or approach to marketing.  Let’s assume they sell tried and tested techniques.  Why don’t they work?

I’ve said this time and again and it is bad news for any entrepreneur.  Most things don’t work.  Why?  Because most things solve the wrong problem.

Choose the wrong technique, implement it efficiently and you are motoring away from the solution you seek.  Several months later, you have spent time and money on an approach that doesn’t work, you have to recover lost ground and then find the right method.  You must understand the problem you face, to find the right solution.  There’s no point in putting yourself in front of people, if your problem is they don’t trust you.

Just as you seek to solve your market’s problem, you need to name your own problem, to find the best way to promote your business.  Your market is as aware of the risks of investing in the wrong message as you are.  Think of your own experiences and ask how you can reassure your market that you can meet their needs.

What’s Your Problem?

1. Does your market know you exist?
2. How do you know you really understand their problem?
3. How can you know your market trusts you?

Most Things Don’t Work

It is important to understand your problem not only because it is difficult or impossible to sell while you have your problem:

Most business-owners are aware they have issues they need to consider, even though they may not know what they are or be mistaken about them.  It is essential you take time to name your problem and find the help you need to solve it.

Following this twelfth 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.