Category Archives for "Purpose"

Building Belonging Brings Value

Most marketers are into building belonging.  Many talk about building a tribe.  But there is a distinction between marketing to a tribe and actively and openly building one.

What is it?

A tribe is people like us.  You sell to them because people like us buy things like this.  If someone belongs to such a tribe, they value what you offer because they believe it is right for them.  Their sense of belonging increases but they might equally be unaware of the tribe they belong to.

So, one choice is to show how your offer enhances their sense of belonging.

Value for the Client

So, what is it about belonging, your client finds valuable?

Status plays an important role but status alone is unlikely to make the deal happen.  Online activities, for example, have an initial status appeal but in time the name of the teacher and course seems less attractive. Most people don’t know these names and why should they trust you recycling what you learned from others?

Being a member of a group that provides genuine support may be really attractive.  Here you are not sitting at the feet of a teacher so much as discussing and working on problems together.  This experience has status appeal.  Being part of an inner circle can be very attractive.

How to Get There

It is difficult to move from nothing to an inner circle in one bound.  To build a group requires trust.  Your tribe does not belong to you.  They exist mostly in isolation unaware of other members or that they belong to that tribe.

So, your task is to raise awareness for members of the problem they share.  Some listen and take up your offer and so you begin to build trust.  You find yourself able to introduce members of the tribe.

Your Offer

You could offer membership of a club where you teach or discuss issues of common interest to meet in-person or online.  There are numerous closed groups online, where people choose to gather.

Meetings can be social or educational and more usually both.  They can be for learning, networking, support, consultancy on some situation, case, project or problem.

This is the seventh 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: Next:  Reduces Anxiety

+ 9 more

• Functional 14

Provide an Heirloom for the Next Generation

Of the five life changing elements of value, this one is perhaps most distinct.  The focus is on an heirloom for future generations and not so much the business owner.

What is it?

My brother-in-law’s family have a Bible that is a few hundred years old.  They have a distinctive first name passed from generation to generation and the family inscribed detail of each person so named in it.  That’s an heirloom.

As Bain suggests, you can sell products to pass to future generations.  Items of jewellery, for example.  The value of an heirloom goes beyond its monetary value.  The fact that one or more ancestors used the item adds to its value, sometimes called sentimental value.

This is a narrow definition.  Legacy might be a better word because we can leave much more for descendants.

Value for the Client

My father never aimed to leave a fortune to his children.  He believed we would be better off learning skills to provide for our families.  So, note not everyone is interested in leaving an heirloom or legacy for their descendants.  However, legacy implies several possibilities.  Here are a few.

Equipping your children with the knowledge and skills they need.  Parents who pay for their children to study at University for example, are in effect leaving a legacy.

Parents pass on skills, knowledge and know-how to children.  If as a business person you know how to make money, these insights are of value to future generations.

Another legacy is to pass on your business.   My father hoped I would take on his business but my interests were elsewhere.  But where there is willingness to take it on, this can work.  To pass on the business early can mean you develop new interests while still available to lend a hand as the new business owner navigates unfamiliar waters.

Or else, pass on elements of the business.  If you are in property for example, you might leave a property portfolio for each child.

And of course, you can sell the business and leave money.  There are several reasons you might sell your business and legacy may have a minor role, as you may need to provide for immediate needs during retirement.  This is a complex area and if your business has value, you are likely to need professional help to sell it.

How to Get There

All these options have potential for business support.  They all benefit from specialist help.

Someone who wants to make provision for their children, must consider the best steps they can take.  One obvious point is children may have different needs and inclinations.  I admired and copied my father but I was never interested in the one thing he worked for.  My sister may have been a better bet to take over his business but at the time that was not something anyone considered.

There are many stories of wayward children who squander the family fortune.  Others may be willing but lack business sense or may resent a parent who interferes in what is now their business.

Where it works out, legacies can be of value but they need careful planning and realism.

Maybe in the end an heirloom is the best option!

Your Offer

There are opportunities for coaches or consultants in this area.  Simply working out the best strategy can be a real challenge.  So, can complex activities such as selling a business.

This is perhaps mainly the domain of financial advisors but the issue may come up for other coaches and consultants.  There’s no harm asking about legacies as a part of a business growth or marketing package.

This is the sixth 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

Next:  Affiliation and Belonging

• Emotional 10
• Functional 14

Motivation: How to Help Clients Achieve Their Goals

Motivation, the third of five life changing elements follows on from the previous two.  Some coaches provide hope, support self-actualisation and motivate their clients.

What is it?

When you provide hope you help your client build a strategy or design that determines their goals.  Self-actualisation is the means to meet those goals.  Once you know where you’re going and how to get there, motivation makes sure you actually do it.

Shipping is sometimes the hardest challenge business-owners face.  Those attempting other challenges, eg keeping healthy, can face similar challenges.  Shipping is where we actually put something into the world and so subject it to others.

Value for the Client

Motivation is not about getting out of bed in the morning.  Inability to get out of bed and other forms of procrastination are usually related to other fears.  For the business person it is fear of having a treasured idea rejected by the public.

Motivation is a combination if reassurance and accountability.

How to Get There

Reassurance is close examination of fears.  How likely are they to happen?  What steps can you take to prevent them or mitigate their effects?  If they happen, what benefits might they bring?

Accountability is agreeing you will discuss reasons for delays.  Many business owners work for themselves and no-one cares whether they succeed or fail.  Someone who cares and demands explanations can be really helpful.

Your Offer

Fear of shipping is common and severely inhibits business growth.  A coach who holds their clients to account can be valuable but the value of this service may not be immediately clear.

For this reason, motivation can be combined with other elements of value.  There is little value in motivation to do what turns out to be the wrong thing and so, combined with providing hope and self-actualisation, motivation can add to the perceived value of an offer.

This is the fifth 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
• Next:  Heirloom
• + 1 more

• Emotional 10

• Functional 14

How to Promote Self-Actualisation

Words like self-actualisation leave me cold.  But it is the second of Bain’s life changing elements and so I’ll have a go.

What is it?

Self-actualisation is about personal accomplishment or improvement according to Bain.  So, it is about learning a new skill or honing an existing skill.

You may be approached by someone who is clear about where they are going but needs help to get there.

Say, you’re a piano teacher and someone approaches you who wants to be a concert pianist (or perhaps you approach them!).  Your task is to help them play the piano better.  It is not to question their goal of being a concert pianist.  You might of course assess their skills and give them feedback.  That feedback might be they will never be good enough to be a concert pianist.  Presumably that would mark the end of your relationship.

Some piano teachers provide hope, strategic direction as well as the coaching that results in self-actualisation.

Value for the Client

This is easy.  The client seeks out the person best placed to help them meet their goals.  This is their primary motivation.  If they don’t know what they want they can’t accomplish anything.

You as a coach may offer to provide hope and self-actualisation but they are different values.  No coach can specialise in everything and so once a client decides, they re-assess coaching needs because they may need specialist help their first coach can’t provide.  Similarly where self-actualisation leads to reappraisal, the existing piano teacher may not be the best option.

How to Get There

Self-actualisation is more focused than provision of hope.  It is about learning new skills or polishing old skills with a goal in mind.  It is support for someone as they find their way forward along the road they have chosen.

Your Offer

If you teach a skill, bear in mind the reason someone chooses to work with you is important.  They have some goal in mind and it is important to know what it is.

As a coach you help your client get what they need to meet their goals with your support.  You cannot guide them if you do not know their goal.

This is the fourth 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

Next: Motivation + 2 more

• Emotional 10

• Functional 14

Does Your Offer Provide Hope?

There are several ways the value you offer through coaching or consultancy can be life changing.  This first one is where you provide hope.

What Does it Mean to Provide Hope?

According to Bain, when you provide hope, you offer something to be optimistic about.  So, a business that provides dietary supplements offers hope for a healthier body.

It is worth looking a little closer.  Hope is a theological word and has a specific meaning.  It is often grouped with faith and love; the three great virtues.

So, what is it?  It’s common to see hope as a pietistic belief in heaven; that everything will somehow pan out for the best.  Hope is more active than simply “hoping for the best”.

I think of it this way:

• Faith is the way we perceive the world around us (not belief in a specific doctrinal system)
• Hope is the steps we take towards a better future for ourselves and others
• Love are the specific actions we take in response to the needs of others.

So, hope is strategic; commitment to a course of action.  There is some risk involved. We cannot know our course of action will be successful unless we set out.

Hope is the entrepreneurial virtue!

Value for the Client

It is hard to generalise but the basic idea is to help the client find a route to something they need.  The implication is something is at stake.

If you help your clients acquire a new skill, for example, you do not provide hope unless that skill is on route to a life change the client needs.  Indeed the client might approach you because they have hope!

How to Get There

So, you provide hope when you teach not only a skill but also help the client work out how to use the skill to reach a life-changing goal.

Hope is not an instant return on investment.  It is a change to the way the client approaches the world.  They may need to change the way they perceive the world as well as find the path they need to make the change they need.

Your Offer

So, don’t claim this value unless you offer the opportunity for real change in your client’s life.  It may involve helping the client acquire new skills but simply teaching a skill is not in itself a way to provide hope.

I coach in marketing and some of my clients have changed what they offer as a result of my coaching because they see a new opportunity.  Sometimes this amounts to a completely new direction and that is when I know I have provided hope.

Neither I nor my client can be certain their new road will be successful but making that decision to try the road is a sign of hope.

This is the third 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

next Self-Actualisation

+ 3 more elements

• Emotional 10 elements

• Functional 14 elements

How Self-Transcendence Enhances Value

This first Element of Value is key to the others.  Self-transcendence is the only Social Impact Element and the only one where businesses pass value to others or society in general.

What is Self-Transcendence?

The problem is social impact is a mutual benefit, and the term “self-transcendence” returns focus to the self.

Mutuality is important and easily lost where a business donates to a charitable cause; a limited approach to social impact that has two important downsides:

1. This one-way approach to charity means business has no skin in the game. They take little interest in how effective their donation is.  They may be interested in the immediate impact of their giving, the outputs.  “We equipped x schools with y desks.”  But what are the outcomes? Is the business committed to social change or does it just want to look good?
2. There is no harm in looking good. A business can point to the good it does, the real change for the better it commits to and benefit from its work for transformation through its marketing.  Arm’s length giving does not do this. Agreeing with a charity for mutual benefit is likely to be good for both parties.

Self-transcendence implies mutual benefit.  When a business passes value to others and society in general it benefits because because prospects see how it benefits others.  This is a business that contributes to well-being beyond its immediate customers.  In a sustainable economy, the costs to the business are balanced by the benefits it receives when prospects perceive it as a beneficial and therefore welcome presence in the economy.

Value for the Client

If self-transcendence is important to your client, what is its value to them?

Let’s consider two kinds of client.

The first is someone in business for social transformation.  They want to help people and see change in the world around them.  They need financial success to meet their aim.  This implies they seek mutual benefit.  For these clients, selling their services is likely to be an issue; is it ethical?  Their vision is a strength and perhaps a barrier to realistic business practice.

The second sees no social impact from their work.  Yet, social impact is real for all businesses as people are unlikely to buy if social impact is negative.  So, knowing the social impact of your business is no disadvantage.  It opens up new dimensions to marketing.  It may be possible to enhance social impact through increased awareness and so increase income.

Social impact offers all businesses strategic direction.  It does not have to be charitable.  Improving management in a specific industry might be social impact, for example.

How to get there.

A good question to ask is: “What social impact do we have?”  Something that flows naturally from your business is likely to be more satisfying than charitable giving tacked on to assuage guilt and look good.

If your focus is on building the business and balancing books, perhaps you have not taken time to look at the impact the business has and build on that as integral to its future.  A clear transformational role, tempered by financial reality can set the strategic direction for a business.

We’ll see over the next weeks there are other things you can build on for strategic direction.  But this one is on top for a reason.  It sets the strategic context in which all businesses work.   If a business cannot articulate the value it offers to society, it is likely to lose direction.  It is not that it has no value to society but the business-owner is unaware of the impact of their own business.

Your offer

Businesses that offer a bit more and invite customers to take part in social change have a competitive edge.  Not everyone is drawn to the same thing but the point is to find those customers that are and build on their commitment to your social aims.

So, the challenge is to work out how to offer social transformation through your business.  This may be easier for coaches or consultants who can point to direct changes they cause through their work.  For businesses that offer products there are options from negative, eg mitigating environmental impact, through to the positive good using the product does beyond the immediate customer, through to activities the business takes part in as  part of its mission.

This is the second 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:

Elements of Value

This post introduces a new sequence about Elements of Value.  It is based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; a version I have mentioned in passing, see What do People Want that introduces Elements of Value.

Setting Your Price

Setting your price is an art.  Too high and people don’t believe it reflects the value of your offer and too low, you don’t cover your costs.

There are other things to consider besides cost and value.  For example, you may introduce low price offers to prove your value, establish your reputation, etc.  There are pros and cons to all of these.

However, in this post I focus on costs and value to the customer.  Generally customer bears their costs unless you choose to meet them.  Value, if you show it in advance, tends to support increases in your price.

Remember though, there are no set rules.

What are Costs?

Costs to the customer can massively exceed the price.   There are several ways this might work.  For example, you offer a course and ask your customer to purchase a text-book.  You don’t have to do this, eg you could offer a copy of the book as a bonus.  You might choose to supply essential texts and leave it for the customer to decide about supporting texts.

If you supply the text-book, you add its price to your costs.  This expense may be so low compared with your profit on the deal, it makes little difference financially.  But presented as a bonus it adds value to your offer.

Other costs are harder to assuage.  If you are a coach or consultant, your customer will need to invest time in preparation for meetings.  Your prospect must understand their contribution to your effectiveness in advance.  Your customer’s time is valuable and a few hours’ work can add to the overall cost.  You reduce this by ensuring preparatory work is relevant, provide support, etc.

If you are alert to the costs to the customer, you can manage them together and show how they contribute to the value of the offer.

What is Value?

So, the costs, whether borne by you or your client tend to hold prices down.  Your prospect compares perceived costs with perceived value.  They are unlikely to buy if costs outweigh value.

It is not a good idea to hide the costs to the client.  The costs to the client are the contribution they make to the success of your joint enterprise.

Let’s say the cost to the client is 3 hours’ work a week.  This work is essential and so the client must know about it before they buy your offer.  If they are aware and do not do the work, then you can discuss what you can do together given they have already acknowledged the need for the work.

The temptation might be to reflect these costs in your prices.  However, this is not a good idea for several reasons.  If you cut your prices, you need more clients and these take up more time, reducing the value of your support because you have to spread it more thinly.  Worse though, the costs to your clients are likely to increase with the value of your offer.  A higher value offer makes greater demands on your client.  If you cut prices for every increase in value, you have no incentive to develop high-end offers!

The solution is to increase the value to your clients.  If the perceived value is worth the effort, they are likely to opt for your offer.  If they want it enough, they will find the money.

Elements of Value

If you follow the link to the Elements of Value, you see 30 suggestions.  One of them is making money.  That leaves 29 other elements.

You can offer more than one Element of Value and some will be easier for you than others.  Bain offers 4 levels of value and from lowest to highest, here they are:

As this is based on Maslow’s triangle, the idea is you need to meet needs at a lower level before you move to the next.  So, you need to meet some of functional needs before you start on the emotional.  And so on.

Perhaps you need to offer value at all four levels to make a high value offer.  This suggests a belt and braces approach to life.  Get the foundations in place and build the higher values on the foundations.

However, this conceals a disadvantage.  It lacks vision.  If you have no sense of the social impact you intend, how can you know which foundational value you need?  Many people know the changes they want to see and need to work out the values they need from lower down the triangle.

This is why my listing of the 4 levels is upside-down.    It is possible to build a business, see where it takes you and then decide upon social impact.  But many people set out with a vision and must back-fill the other values they need to meet that vision.

This is why over the next 30 weeks I shall start with social impact and work down the triangle, exploring each level in turn.  Starting from the top suggests a strategic approach.  It is for those who know the change they want to see and seek the other values they need to get to their goal.

Two Final Points

First, it is possible to start lower down.  Life changing goals are fine and may provide the strategic goal you need.  Once you meet this goal, you may find a social impact goal appears naturally.

And for those who worry about making a profit, remember: if you want to help more people, you need to be financially successful.  This is about becoming successful enough to carry out your social impact goals.

This is the first of 31 posts about Elements of Value.  Make sure you don’t miss any by signing up for the offer below.  Access previous posts in this sequence below:

Your Lifestyle Purpose in the Wider Community

Trade has always been at the heart of community.  Some say prostitution is the oldest profession.  But humanity must have established trade for all professions to emerge.  Professions emerge to meet needs and wants from the wider community and so trade is normally closely related to community.  Lifestyle purpose in the wider community is relevant and important.

Think Global, Act Local

People used this slogan during the eighties as globalisation moved centre stage.  We have seen massive changes since then in the way we understand trade.

The silk roads across Asia existed for at least 1000 years, probably a lot longer.  They link China to the Mediterranean Sea.  They still do, or would, were it not for conflicts in Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq.  Plundered wealth from the New World added a new dimension to world trade, as Europe found a new source of wealth.

Mostly, people bought from merchants who lived close by and so localised trade.  Those merchants traded with other merchants and so brought more exotic products to local communities.

What has changed is not that the world has started to trade between far-flung countries but control of that trade.  Large corporations centralise power over the markets.  They accumulate wealth by controlling the products on the market.  Local traders must find a small niche to help them find their place in the economy.

My aim here is to suggest trade happens anyway; we do not need corporations.  Any small business helps create space where local economies thrive and adds value to products and services.

The Agora

The agora or marketplace, is where the local economy happens and note it is the core of any community.  Community does not create wealth, wealth creates community.  Look at what happens to neighbourhoods that do not have an economic centre.  They become estates where people live with little autonomy.

The wealth of a community offers freedom to its members.   With more money in circulation, there are more opportunities for small businesses; capacity offers niches for new enterprises.

Everything else that is public or Negotium, takes place in the Agora.  This is the place for government, for law courts, places of worship, news, debate, entertainment …  It is where people bring what they develop in Otium and  use it to build community, usually through business.

Practicalities

It is hard to see a way forward in the present day.  With too little wealth in the economy, we do not see the Agora as a whole; we compartmentalise our lives, fully assisted by electronic media.

The world is on the brink of massive changes as climate change increases and competition over resources becomes more pressing.  We need to look to the past to inform how we exist in the future.

For now, remember the way you use your time is important to you, your family and friends.

Communication is currently easier than it was throughout history and we should use it while we have it.  At the same time, it is the human mind that transforms information into value.  That value is not solely monetary, it is in the relationships that trade properly depends upon.

Ultimately the outcomes of our business are not financial so much as relationships, the common causes we make together.

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?

How Your Client Benefits from Your Lifestyle Purpose

And so we move from work in private (Otium) to the public dimension (Negotium).  Here you find opportunities to deploy not only the skills of trade but also your private passions, interests, skills and enthusiasms.  So, let’s consider how your client benefits from your lifestyle purpose.

Your Coaching

It may not be obvious how your life-experience, passions and interests benefit your client.  They purchase your services because you have expertise or experience.

Remember the way your life-experience informs your work is most likely implicit.  For example, someone who offers health therapies may find conversations with business owners easy because they already use conversations to put their patients at ease and help them open up.

The key lies in preparation for each meeting so that you know what to offer the client as they struggle with a particular issue.

The implicit promise made by coaches is they listen to their client to free their speech.  This is valuable because most offers on the market assume the client needs a proven solution to a known problem.

There are benefits to the business-owner who can automate their offer.  It saves time and increases the number of clients they can handle.  It is difficult to automate coaching.  Actually it is impossible to automate coaching, although it may be possible in part.

Preparation is crucial and we see Otium‘s importance.  The coach must prepare for each meeting, reviewing their client’s records, preparing questions and suggestions for the client to consider.

Types of Question

It may help to have a set of questions to use for all clients.  These move the sessions with the client forwards.  They change slowly, through experience.  Without such structure, it is likely the sessions will never move forward.  They decide what you consider.  It helps get everything relevant on the table.

The coach may prepare subsidiary questions for the client, based on their answers so far.  The client will act between sessions and so it is important to discuss their actions and results.

And there will be questions formulated and asked during the sessions, in response to what the client says.

All these stages of preparation can and should engage the whole person.  What can the coach draw on from their experience to help their client?  This will range from directly relevant experiences, eg work in the same industry; common human experiences, eg family life; through to unique experiences that introduce a new perspective.

Stability

Knowing the coach has a lifestyle purpose is one way to decide whether the coach can deliver.  A coach overly focused on profit, for example, may be prone to burnout, stress, loss of perspective.  A coach who turns up for meetings tired or rattled does not present the best opportunity for the client to make progress.

Also, a coach aware of their own lifestyle purpose will be sensitive to the need for a similar purpose in the client.  There is no problem where lifestyle pervades business, especially for self-employed people, where marketing themselves is their business.

Large companies may frown upon employees bringing their own lifestyle purpose to the workplace, perhaps undermining the company’s consistent message.  But this is not true for the self-employed, they are the message and if they can find an approach that draws on what they enjoy doing, their enthusiasm will communicate.

That sense of being at ease with business and life is a big draw to people; to communicate that ease to their clients increases trust.

These benefits extend, of course, beyond the client to the wider world.

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?

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?