How To Nail Down How Your Clients Benefit From your Service Or Products
Coaching - different things to many people
.How do you differentiate yourself from the thousands of coaches that are floating around?
Ones that are trained through academy's, others that work from related experience and others from unrelated experience.
I came across a very interesting set of questions that helped me understand how to look at my coaching.
To get the same intriguing information replace coaching with your own service or product.
The questions were as follows:
- What is the danger to your client if he doesn't hire you?
What is the danger to your client if he doesn't utilize you regularly?
What is the danger to your client if he uses a less qualified coach?
What is the danger to your client if they wait to hire you?
So as I sell myself as a business and marketing coach, I approached the questions with that in mind. I could equally well have used the word copywriter instead of coach. Below are the questions again and the answers that came straight off the top of my head. There are no rights or wrongs with this approach it's simply to highlight how you can sell yourself better.
A) What is the danger to your client if he doesn't hire you?
- He's unlikely to ever find out tactics that can make his business much more profitable and if his competitors do he'll be overtaken and forced to sell up/move/bankrupt
- He'll continue to work in the business and without work on the business he'll simply be busy, busy all the time. The result is that he'll be in a job rather than a business. That's why there's so many one man businesses around.
- He'll have to work longer and longer hours simply to make the income he needs to maintain his families life style until eventually he loses his family because they never see him.
- He'll become more and more desperate not knowing whether he's reinventing the wheel when it comes to marketing and actually doing it wrong. Thus throwing money at marketing without any hope that it will work.
- His competitors will make much more profits than he can and their lifestyle will measurably improve and that will be a pressure on him from his family to have a life style like his competitors family.
B) What is the danger to your client if he doesn't utilize you regularly?
- To stay focused on continually improving his business and his marketing he needs a regular sounding board and someone who can offer advice if the plan deviates from the expected. If he doesn't he'll make ill considered decisions that will affect cashflow and ultimately the company.
- If he has nobody to complain to without fear of reprisal about his company, or getting well intentioned but useless advice about his staff, his suppliers his customers he'll start to be bottling up emotions that will affect his relationships at work and home leading to divorce and possible loss of the company.
- His attention can be diverted from the plans that are in place simply by working in the business. That could mean the plans fail and ultimately the company fails to grow and thrive.
C) What is the danger to your client if he uses a less qualified coach?
- He may continually try to use the ways that the inferior coach is suggesting to improve his business with the result he pays more money for ineffective advice and actions. Ultimately if he continues down this line he'll make the company bankrupt, or he'll lose out by never trusting a coach again.
D) What is the danger to your client if they wait to hire you?
- If they wait to hire me they could lose an opportunity to review the business now and quickly respond to their market with a need that may be gone in 6 months time. If they lose that quick win the cashflow could be affected and their market will already be using their fleeter foot competitors.
- If they wait they wont make the extra money they would have made. That extra money could be the difference between the company surviving and going under.
- They may make decisions that with a coaches help could have been improved significantly and thus they could make the company bankrupt.
So like I say an interesting and useful exercise.
It certainly gives you the ammunition you need when people ask why they should use you.
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