OUR BLOG

You’re a professional service provider. So, what’s the number one problem you’re having in building or expanding your business?

The answer’s likely to be different if you’re a more seasoned professional vs. someone who’s not fully established, so I’ve divided this newsletter into two parts. Scroll down to the heading that best describes where you are and use this as a way to diagnose what you need to do to move forward!

“In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

I like that quotation. And the message here is simple as it applies to marketing your business.

You don’t have to know everything there is to know about marketing and do it perfectly to be successful at it. You just have to do a couple of things others aren’t doing to make yourself more attractive to potential clients and give yourself a competitive edge. That’s because advantage is a relative thing.

You just have to be able to see what others don’t see and translate those insights into results.

When it comes to marketing yourself, here are two big things so many people are blind to that I want you to see clearly.

What makes us do what we do?

We need to make a living, sure, but there are any number of ways to do that.

Beyond making money, why do you do what you do? Why did you choose the profession you chose … or the one you’re considering getting into?

The following email from a former client tells you everything you’d ever want to know about why I got into coaching. I wanted to share it with you, because it makes me happy … and because it can help you serve more of the people you want to serve.

I coach a lot of business owners. It’s what I do. People often think of me as a speaker and speaking coach, but first and foremost, I’m a business coach. I help people with all aspects of starting and running a successful service-based business.

And it’s not just the how–to’s. We go deeper than that, often focusing on those intangible elements that can separate those who make it from those who either struggle or simply don’t make it.

Two of the biggest separators?

Back in the heyday of the passenger ship, there was a man who owned a steamship with an engine that wouldn’t run properly no matter what his crew did to fix it. So, he called on an outside expert to diagnose the problem and get the engine running smoothly again.

It didn’t take long. The master mechanic came on board, listened intently to the engine for a while, reached into his toolkit, brought out a hammer, and fetched the engine housing a mighty whack. Instantly, the engine started humming like it was new.

I’ve spoken at several conferences over the last few months, and when I’m there, I go to hear as many of the other speakers as I can.  I do it so I can benefit from their insights.

But I also can’t help seeing and hearing the things they do as presenters … what works and what doesn’t. 

I talk a lot about the importance of serving prospective clients vs. selling them.  That distinction is at the heart of our attraction-based marketing system, an approach that works wonders, especially for people who just can’t bring themselves to do the traditional sales thing.

But, let’s be clear … and this is important … serving someone does not mean charging them less than you’re worth or giving away your service.  It doesn’t mean sacrificing for the other person’s benefit.

If speaking is the number one way to market and build your business, why aren’t more people out there doing it?

I mean, it’s not as if coming up with a great talk, learning it, getting the engagements booked, and presenting yourself and your message well, is all that hard. It isn’t.

But several things scare off or derail would-be speakers. They shouldn’t, but they do.

I’ve resisted writing on this subject, even though a lot of you out there desperately need to hear what I have to say.

I hesitated to bring it up, because it might seem self-serving, but the issue has just come up too many times with too many people for me to ignore. 

It’s a BIG problem, causing a significant amount of underperformance from some of our best and brightest service providers out there … and I can’t just sit here and let it continue without speaking my mind.

There are two basic marketing strategies … what I call high touch and low touch. They complement each other.

High touch strategies involve direct, personal interaction with potential clients. Anything that gives them an immediate experience of you is a high touch strategy. You might give them this first-hand sense of who you are and what you have to offer by speaking to groups, doing radio and TV interviews, networking, conducting classes and demonstrations, or just sitting down with prospective clients over coffee.

Low touch strategies, by contrast, rely on indirect contact with people. These include everything from business cards, brochures, and websites to traditional advertising and signage. Twitter, Facebook, and blogging are somewhere between fully high touch and low touch.

Now, here’s a quiz question. Which brings in the business?