September 2012 - Small Business Coach, Women Business Coaching - Client Attraction

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Today’s topic is the law of association. You might be thinking, “So, how does this help me get more clients?” The law of association is one of these universal or spiritual principles that really apply everywhere.

It’s something that is one of these shortcuts or trump cards for entrepreneurs who understand what it’s all about. It means that if you want to multiply your business very quickly, you must not be a lone ranger. The law of association states that whom you spend your time with and whom you listen to dictates how big of a game you play in your business. (Click here to tweet this.)

It also dictates the level of your income. Imagine you’re right here, by yourself working in your office and you’re just by yourself and kind of doing things the way that you’ve been doing them. Then, imagine that instead you’re surrounded by people who champion you, who stretch you to think and play a bigger game, who give you resources and you have a strong mentor who pulls you into our future. Can you see the difference between these two entrepreneurs? This one will take teeny, tiny incremental steps in getting to their next level and this one will grow by leaps and bounds because of the expectations of their peer group.

When you are surrounded by people who expect more from you than you expect from yourself, you produce more. You grow faster. You turn years into months and months into days. Whereby here, you don’t know what you don’t know about getting to the next level. I believe that your income is directly proportionate to the expectations of your peer group. If you are walking through life on a journey with people who play a bigger game, instantly you begin playing a bigger game. You begin taking more action than you’ve ever taken before.

This is why I believe that if you want to succeed in your business you must surround yourself with other advancing people; people who believe that their future is greater than their past as opposed to some of the people that you may be spending time with now, who complain about the price of gas or who have a scarcity view of life.

I believe in surrounding myself with people who believe in abundance, who believe in advancing to the next level, and who champion a winner. That is a mark of a winner, someone who will encourage you and champion you

When you surround yourself with people who aren’t this way, I believe that you drown in their mediocrity. It’s very easy to spiral and to think like the people you spend the most time with. So, who do you want to spend the most time with? I want to spend time with people who are up to big things, who have exciting things to talk about, who are very giving and generous, but also who want to create more for themselves. They’re not happy with the status quo. They want to keep going. They’re always asking, “What’s next?”

When I spend time with people like that I play so much bigger in my business. In fact, I love to be in a group where I’m the person who’s doing the least well, if you know what I mean. I belong to some mastermind groups where sometimes some people in the group make $2 million a week. Now, that might seem like a lot to you, but I love to be in conversations with those types of people.

To accelerate your own abundance, I invite you to surround yourself with people who are doing really well. Model people who are already living the life that you want to live. If there’s somebody that inspires you and motivates you and you think to yourself, “Wow, I want to be like that person. I want my business to be like that person’s business,” then study them. Study them. Study from them. Read their books. Attend their seminars. Coach with them. Join their mastermind groups. Do whatever you can to emulate them.

At the same time, surround yourself with people, perhaps it’s a mastermind, who are already playing that bigger game because when you do that, that is what I call the ultimate shortcut. I believe that you can do things slowly or you can do things quickly an elegantly and gracefully.

Your Client Attraction Assignment

Look around and see who’s business you want to model your business after. This is what I do in my own life. I look in my industry and I say, “Okay, I’m ready to play the next level. Who in my industry is doing what I do, but has an extra zero to their income than I do?” Then, I learn from them and then I hire them and then I work with them.

I invite you to do that. By all means stop being a lone ranger and stop learning from people who are your peers as opposed to people who will pull you into your future.

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Amy Sinclair, owner of Ears of Experience, a Disney concierge travel company, shares her experience as a Platinum Mastermind client in the Client Attraction Winners Academy.

A year ago I was watching the Mindset Retreat livestream. An acquaintance of mine posted on Facebook that she was there, so I was interested to see what it was about – I almost took the laptop out to dinner with my family because I was compelled to keep watching. I watched the panel and really resonated with one of the panelists, who was also a mom.  Back then, in my business I was sneaking in emails to clients at stop lights, while attending my daughter’s basketball game, at the grocery store – it was unmanageable.

I started with the Bootcamp, which doubled our business, so then I joined Platinum. The Platinum retreats are great. The relationships here are strong because the people understand you as an entrepreneur and its hard to find that in other networking groups. I get a lot of ideas during the meetings and the group helps generate new ideas.  It’s a good balance of technical and business resources, too.

Our numbers are phenomenal. We are up 161%!  Our goal for this year is 1 million in sales and we will accomplish that easily.

A year ago, I had one person helping and was just starting a new bookkeeper. Now we have a really great team, with a team culture that we learned from Fabienne and Derek.  What’s more important is: I’m not working until 3 am anymore and now I can spend time with my kids. I feel less stress.

If you’re thinking you can do it all on your own, you probably can, like a hamster in the wheel. You’ll fall out of love with your business and you’re going to shut down. You just can’t do it on your own. Get the help, get the guidance and grow the business. It’s an amazing feeling.

Are you having trouble setting your fees? For some of my clients it’s not easy to set a proper fee. You might hear yourself wondering things like, “Who do I think I am charging that much?”

Let me share something that has really worked for me. This strategy changed my life when I started noticing how much I did not want to become a commodity. This is such an important stance to take about your fees and your business, I want you to say this out loud right now. “I do not want to become a commodity!”

Particularly in the field of coaching, potential clients may talk to several coaches and ask how much they charge per hour. They are trying to compare pricing, thinking each coach is the same, but what you offer can be very different. So that is not how you want to be seen!

The solution for me was to create packages and programs instead of the “by the session” kind of fee structure. The idea is to blur the lines so prospects can’t really tell what you charge per hour. This shift was miraculous for me.

Years ago I was charging a fee for a certain number of coaching hours per month. But my dream was to have fewer clients and be able to spend more time with them. To make my dream possible, I needed to double my fee. That triggered all my issues. “Who am I to do this? Will I really give them that much value that they’ll pay me this amount?” You get the idea of what floated through my head.

I decided I didn’t want the people who were price shopping. That’s when the idea popped into my head to create a program instead of my hourly fee to blur the lines. So clients would get a fixed amount of phone time, but they also got email access, the Client Attraction Home Study system, five minute check-ins by phone, a three hour in-person meeting at my office and other materials!

Blurring the lines helped people see incredible value with all the materials and access so they couldn’t tell how much I charged by the hour. When you do this too, you can make more money and prevent people from comparing your rates.

Your Client Attraction Assignment
If you are still charging by the hour, I recommend you shift to packages. The only way out of the hourly rate trap is by creating more value in how people work with you. Spend time this week thinking about all the different ways you can work with people and add value so you can avoid the commodity pricing mindset prospects can have.

Now, if you’re just starting out and trying to fill your practice in the FIRST place, then follow a step-by-step system that feels easy and authentic to you. The Client Attraction Home Study System™ gives you the most important things to do to set up simple, solid systems, so that you consistently fill your pipeline and continually get new clients. It’s all step-by-step, not a big mishmash of things. So, you do step one of the system, and when you’re done with that, you move on to step two, and so on. All the tools, scripts, templates, and examples are handed to you on a silver platter. Easy. You can get it at TheClientAttractionSystem.com.

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Today’s topic is something that people ask me about all the time. What do you do when all this stuff that I’ve been teaching works and you get to full practice capacity? You can’t take on any more clients without pulling your hair out and there’s just no more ‘you’ to go around.

The first thing you can do is create a waiting list. That’s good for the short term but it doesn’t really do much because you still have them waiting for you.

Second, you can raise your rates. You can decide to either raise your rates just for your new clients or to raise your rates with all of your clients.  You may be saying (because I’ve heard this for the last 12 years of coaching people), “Oh, but Fabienne, they won’t pay for that.”  Sure, some of your existing clients will fall off, but yes—some of them will pay for that, especially if you have a waiting list. It’s been my experience that in the past when I would raise my rates every three or four or six months, people would just gladly pay for it. If you give good value, people will pay for it. And even though others fell off, you will end up making more money because you have all these new clients paying the new rate. (Click here to tweet this.)

The next steps to take once you’ve filled your practice are to learn to clone and leverage yourself. This is where you have to start thinking about what you can do with your intellectual property—all of that knowledge that’s in your head.  Consider creating a product where you teach people what you do with private clients and you put it in a box.  This is big in the information marketing business, which is really the advice-giving business.  You can put all of your knowledge in a box and sell that box.

You can also begin to work with groups.  Many years ago when I had a full practice of clients, I decided to create a group program—my Boot Camp—which allowed me to teach this information to a group of 12 to 20 people at the same time, but at a reduced cost for them.  So I actually made more per hour than I did with private clients, but individually they paying less.

You can also teach this as a seminar. Take all of your knowledge, teach it as a two or three day seminar and charge $1,000, $2,000, $3,000—whatever you want to charge.

Lastly, begin to bring on associates. These are people who you can train to work with you to teach all of the surplus clients.  (We don’t like to think of them as surplus clients.  Everybody is significant and important but you know what I mean, the ones that you can’t handle.)

So those are some of the things you can do when your practice fills to capacity, and we teach all about this in the Platinum Mastermind of our Winners Academy.  It’s all about leveraging and  really getting to that next level by cloning yourself through team, systems and technology.  This is a really important theme that you must think about when you get to about $75,000 or $100,000 in your business and you don’t have any more room for clients and no more time to spare.

Your Client Attraction Assignment

Even if you’re not yet at full practice capacity, start thinking about what you will do once you get to that place.  Create a plan for the future. And if you’re at full capacity now, start leveraging and cloning yourself by implementing some of these suggestions.

Play Big Master Class Join Fabienne and Janet Hanson for this conversation about inspiration and courage, while you discover “best practices” on how to play your own bigger game. Enjoy!
Widely respected as a leading entrepreneur, Janet Hanson is recognized as a unique voice and champion for women globally. As CEO and Founder of 85 Broads, Janet has built a global network community of 30,000 trailblazing women who want to leverage their best personal and professional relationships to create greater success for themselves and each other.
Launched in 1997, the “founding members” of 85 Broads were women who worked for Goldman Sachs at 85 Broad Street, the firm’s NYC headquarters.Today, students and alumnae of the world’s leading colleges, universities, and graduate schools are invited to join 85 Broads from every corner of the globe and from every possible career path. Together, these women make up the most powerful, intellectually savvy network of women in the world. As a multi-­‐cultural, multi-­‐generational network, 85 Broads members live, work, and study in 82 different countries and work for thousands of for-­‐profit and not-­‐for-­‐profit companies worldwide.
After graduating from Wheaton College and Columbia Business School, Janet joined Goldman Sachs in 1977. In 1986, she became the first woman in the firm’s history to be promoted to sales management. Following her 14-­‐year career at Goldman Sachs, Janet founded Milestone Capital Management, a $2 billion institutional money management company.
From 2004 to 2007, Janet was a Managing Director and Senior Adviser to the President of Lehman Brothers.Janet is also an avid investor and frequently speaks and writes about the importance of women becoming astute, lifelong investors.

Janet is a member of the Kellogg Center for Executive Women’s Steering Committee. She is a member of the Forbes Executive Women’s Board. She is a former member of the Board of Trustees of Wheaton College and a current member of the Board of The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. She is an Associate Fellow of Pierson College at Yale University and serves on the Advisory Board of The Center for Work-­‐Life

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Some clients have asked me when just starting out how to create their own intellectual property. They are worried about creating original content versus leveraging materials that others have developed.

This is something you need to be very careful about. As you know most intellectual property is protected legally with copyrights and even trademarks.

Recently, one client asked me if she could use my elevator pitch process. And if not, how could she possibly make up her own system when so many already exist out there. This is what I recommended.

If you want to quote or use something from a book or another expert’s system, do so, but make sure you give the author full and proper credit. You may also want to ask for their permission. If you are including someone else’s material in anything written, whether it’s printed or on the web, be sure to cite the original source.

On the web, you can even add a link directly to the author’s materials. This actually will drive traffic to the author’s site so they might feel flattered and appreciative.

I’m not an attorney, so don’t let me be the final word on this. Please check with your legal advisor to be sure you do things the proper way.

I myself have done this. For example, at the Mindset Retreat, I taught things there that I borrowed. The list of 22 emotions is from the book Ask and It Is Given. I told everyone the name of the book and that I thought they should read it. I even mentioned the page number where the list of emotions came from. I’m not going to pretend that I created the list of 22 emotions or take the list and make it only 21 emotions and rename them all. I give full attribution to the authors of the book when I use it. Does that make sense?

Keep in mind that this does not just apply to names of things, but also to systems, processes and even formats. You need to give credit for all of that.

I believe in teaching what your experience has been – I call this “talking your walk”. That means you do it first and have success. Then you can share with others and tell them how you did it. That way you can figure out your own unique process and create your own proprietary system. And if you still want to use someone else’s tools, that’s OK. When done correctly, it’s like offering referrals to the author right? There’s plenty for everyone.

Your Client Attraction Assignment
Think about your own unique process. What did you try? What worked really well? How is what you have done different than other similar experts? Figure out what you did so you can talk your walk and create your own proprietary system.

That’s why people say to me, “Oh your stuff is really authentic and it’s the real deal.” That’s because I use it every day. When you share your experience authentically, people are drawn to that.

Now, if you’re just starting out and trying to fill your practice in the FIRST place, then follow a step-by-step system that feels easy and authentic to you. The Client Attraction Home Study System™ gives you the most important things to do to set up simple, solid systems, so that you consistently fill your pipeline and continually get new clients. It’s all step-by-step, not a big mishmash of things. So, you do step one of the system, and when you’re done with that, you move on to step two, and so on. All the tools, scripts, templates, and examples are handed to you on a silver platter. Easy. You can get it at TheClientAttractionSystem.com.

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Today, I want to talk to you about the inner game of client attraction. The marketing piece of client attraction is considered the outer game. It is what you do, it is the actions that you take, figuring out who your ideal client is and getting out there in a big way and all that good stuff.

And then there is the inner game. (Click here to tweet this.)

The inner game of client attraction is about your attitude. It is about what you believe and expect to be true about your business, about clients, about how much you charge and how much you are willing to play a bigger game in your business, in your marketing, in anything you do.

At Client Attraction, I always talk about playing a bigger game whether it’s in your marketing or in your mindset. Here is what happens when entrepreneurs attempt to go to the next level of their business. Perhaps it’s holding your first workshop or writing a book for the first time or speaking in public or raising your rates–a lot of times fear will come up. Fears like, “Will they criticize me? Will they want it? They won’t pay for that. I’ll flop.”

There is fear of failure. There is fear of success. There is fear of overwhelm and not getting it right. Fear is actually the biggest obstacle that you’ll face when moving toward the next level in your business.

How do you manage the fear? How do you handle it? My three tips will help you move through the fear so you can play a bigger game with your inner game.

1. Shield yourself from any negativity. If there are people in your life who don’t have a belief that you can make it or that you can do it, shield yourself from that. Shield yourself from anything negative, even the news. I know that’s controversial because some people don’t believe that you can live without watching the news but I believe by doing so you can stay in a place of positive expectation.

2. Stay in a place of positive expectation. What is positive expectation? It is believing in something that has not appeared yet. It means to positively expect great results no matter what you see in front of you and just staying in faith that what you want is on its way to you.

3. Take massive action. Once you are able to shield yourself from the negativity and stay positive, you’ll want to always be taking action. You can’t just sit there and say, “Om! Bring it to me.” You’ve got to be in action.

Your Client Attraction Assignment

Identify what big leaps are you are about to take and think about the fears that are currently holding you back. Now work through the three steps—shield yourself from the negative, stay in a place of positive expectation and take massive action—in order to move through those fears and come out on the other side with all the success you desire.

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Shamala Tan of BeSpiritualAndRich.com shares her experience as a Platinum Mastermind client in the Client Attraction Winner’s Academy.

“One year ago I bought the home study program because I really needed it. I was doing channel readings for people and had a three to four month waiting list of clients. Appointments were back to back, but I was not earning enough money. It was crazy. With the home study program, I restructured my whole business. But I still felt I needed something more.

Then I listened to the success panel from the Mindset Retreat at 4am one morning. It was so inspiring. I said, ‘I really want that.’ I joined the Gold Mastermind program, started implementing a lot and won the implementation contest at one of the quarterly meetings! My income had gone to $10,000 a month and then after the June meeting, increased even more from $15,000 to $18,000 per month.

I also learned the list building from Derek which is incredible. My Facebook page now has 6,000 fans! It all works, everything. You implement it. It works. It got to the point when I heard about the platinum program with six calls a year. I said, ‘Yes, okay. I’m coming on board.’ So I joined Platinum because I want results.

The flying time from Singapore is 24 – 26 hours but I say, ‘If you want it, go and get it.’ And that’s exactly what I did.”

I recently wrote about creating a telesummit to build your contact list. For some, the idea of a telesummit is daunting because it requires getting several speakers to participate and coordinating all of these affiliates. That’s a lot of work.

So, if you feel connecting with other speakers might be too much work, you can run a program on your own. That’s right, you can offer a free weekly teleclass series covering a variety of related topics to attract new prospects. This way, you don’t need to rely on connecting with any other speakers or experts.

People have to opt-in for your teleseries if they want to be part of it, and that means they get added to your list. So, the teleseries actually becomes your Irresistible Free Offer. Plus, at the end of the series, you’ll have all of the audio recordings so you can create a product that you can sell. This is a very efficient strategy that works many angles at the same time ~ list building, product development, and providing real value so prospects get to know the great information you have to offer.

Now, not everyone who registers can make the live call. No problem. Simply record the calls and post the recording on your website. This way, registrants who can’t make the call can listen to the information later and others can listen again if they choose.

To make it even more compelling, consider limiting the replay availability. For example, you might make the recording available for only 24 hours after the live call has ended. When something is limited, it automatically makes it more enticing and desirable. This way, if anyone missed the live call and the recording, they can still purchase the whole package, right?

Your Client Attraction Assignment
Do you have a teleclass series waiting to come to life? Pick one of your best topics and spend time thinking about how to separate its elements into different segments. You can use pieces of your proprietary system. As you think about what information to share, make sure you focus on the “what to do” and “why.” And save the “how” to do it for one-on-one coaching, group coaching or your home study system.

 

Now, if you’re just starting out and trying to fill your practice in the FIRST place, then follow a step-by-step system that feels easy and authentic to you. The Client Attraction Home Study System™ gives you the most important things to do to set up simple, solid systems, so that you consistently fill your pipeline and continually get new clients. It’s all step-by-step, not a big mishmash of things. So, you do step one of the system, and when you’re done with that, you move on to step two, and so on. All the tools, scripts, templates, and examples are handed to you on a silver platter. Easy. You can get it at TheClientAttractionSystem.com.

[youtube width=”600″ height=”352″]http://youtu.be/sJtlSDdSIGQ[/youtube]

Today, I want to talk to you about being more authentic in your marketing. One of the things that really changed my business many years ago is when I started taking down the walls and allowing myself to be more authentic, more real, more genuine, not just in my own life, but in my business. It worked in all areas of my life. That’s how I got together with my husband (not to over-share or anything), but I just took down the walls and I started letting people in, in my personal life. It was amazing what happened.

I started thinking, “What would happen if I did the same thing in my business?” Today, the number one thing that people say to me, especially if they come to one of my live events or join me on a livestream, is “Fabienne, you are the real deal. You are so authentic. You’re so relatable. You’re so vulnerable. This is why I trust you. This is why I feel like I want to work with you. This is why I hired you.” There’s nothing better than hearing that because people who have just met you just days before feel that they trust you. (Click here to tweet this.)

Here are the five ways that I have become more authentic in my marketing for my business and how you can be the same in yours because it does result in more clients, more money and it helps you multiply your business.

1. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable in your business. I don’t know if you were in corporate, but I was for eight years and everything had to be so polished and perfect. You weren’t allowed to make mistakes. In fact, it was all about covering your tush and pointing the finger at other people. Maybe you experienced that like I did.

What I have found is that the more vulnerable I am in my business, letting people in, the more clients I get. This happened the minute that I started being more vulnerable and weaving in some of my experiences in my business. People started coming out of the woodwork.

I have said this before in these videos and I will say it again, “People like a little bit of grit. They don’t like all the slick.” Now, you cannot be a basket case. You cannot air all your dirty laundry. You’ve got to stay somewhat professional and polished, but let it be okay for you to be a little bit vulnerable.

2. Let people learn from your mistakes. I have had clients say to me for years, “Oh, I just love it when I hear about your failures, Fabienne.” At first I just didn’t know what to make of that, but what I’ve learned is if you can put yourself in the trenches with your clients and not on this big pedestal where you’ve got it all figured out, they trust you and they feel closer to you. They feel more connected to you.

I say this to people all the time, “Listen, there is no such thing as marketing nirvana. I will never figure it out fully because marketing keeps changing, so I’m in the trenches with you. I’m going to continually learn. However, I may just be a few steps ahead of you, so I’m going to give you everything that’s working for me.”

I always say, “I have not figured it all out with my mindset. I still have mindset stuff that I need to figure out, but hey, I’m a lot further along than I was 10 or 20 years ago.” I’m in the trenches with you. I keep working on my stuff. Share your experiences with them. Share your failures. Let them learn from all the things that didn’t go so well with you because if there’s a person that’s just a little too perfect, do you really trust them? Not possible. Or else, even if you did trust them, you don’t feel good about yourself around them. If you want to make your prospects and clients feel good around you share your failures.

3. You must really care about people. This is a big one and as you may know in my company, we have this mission statement that says, “We do everything with authenticity, integrity and love.” I know it could sound crazy having the word ‘love’ in our mission statement. But, yes we do.

Here’s why. I may have met you and I may not have met you yet. I hope that if we haven’t yet, that we get to meet you one day really soon, but the idea is that I probably know who you are. You and I are cut from the same cloth because we are both entrepreneurs and we are wired in a different way and we are here to be a catalyst in other peoples’ lives in a way that some other people simply aren’t. Even if I haven’t met one of my followers, fans, prospects or customers from around the world, I still love them.

I still love you. Kooky concept for some people, but there are legions of people that I haven’t met yet that I love. When you love somebody you care for them. You act with love and you give with love and you just genuinely care.

When you post something on a website or in an article or you do a video, you pour your heart into it. People will feel that you are authentic or vulnerable. In fact, sometimes you may have seen me do this on videos or at one of my live events. Sometimes I allow myself to well up in tears. It’s just because I am this way. I am this way in my real life.

4. Be yourself. If you’re funny at home, be funny in your marketing. If you are loving at home, be loving in your marketing. If you are generous at home, be generous in your marketing. If you love pets at home, include your pets in your marketing. If you love kids at home, include kids in your marketing. You’ll recognize that I do that a lot in my work and in my marketing. Be yourself.

5. Act with integrity. If you want to be authentic and you want people to see you as that, you must be sincere and you must act with integrity. That means that you only do the right thing even when no one’s watching. If you mess something up, make it right. If you want to sell something, tell the truth. Always act as if somebody is watching you. People will see that. They may not know whether it’s true or not, but they will feel it energetically and they will see you as being a person of authenticity. When you are a person of authenticity, people trust you and when people trust you they buy from you, they hire you, they recommend you, they give you great testimonials. They keep coming back.

Your Client Attraction Assignment

Start weaving more of this into your business and you will get more clients and you will make more money and you will multiply your business because you’re going to rise to the top. Everybody else will be very slick, but you will be slick with a little bit of grit and people will love you for it.

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