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

The coaching industry has taught students that the best way to get new clients is to offer a complimentary coaching session. I know there are other business coaches out there who have created sales systems built on this model. If you have tried the complimentary session method to close sales and it’s working for you, that’s great! Keep at it.

On the other hand, if you have tried offering free consultations, only to have prospects say thank you and walk away, then you might do much better with my Get Acquainted Call system. This is what I used fill my practices.

Key Steps of the Get Acquainted Call System
1. The process focuses on creating the relationship with people.
2. Through relationship building, prospects to get to know and like you.
3. As prospects get to know you, they start to trust you which helps them feel open to working with you.
4. Then, you invite prospects to the Get Acquainted call to see if you want to work together
5. In just twenty-minutes you can ask your prospect to become your client. And a high percentage will do so because of all the preparatory work you have done.

The Downside of Free Consultations
On the other hand, with the free consultation, it often sets you up to give away a ton of information. The prospects get the initial answers they need for free and walk away feeling satisfied without paying you.

With the get acquainted call, you set the intention of exploring if you want to work together. Then, by following the whole closing the sale process, you will know exactly how to have the conversation so you never have to “sell”.

Your Client Attraction Assignment
If you have been using the Complimentary Session method to get new clients, and want to improve your closing rate, I invite you to try the Get acquainted call. Try it with your next five prospects to see how it works. My bet is you won’t go back to those free sessions.

 

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.

I am a big believer in using social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to connect with more people and add value. To leverage these tools well requires a mix of status updates to accomplish three things:
1) add value
2) build relationships
3) share your solutions and offers

Use a variety of messages
For this post, I’m going to talk specifically about Twitter, but the same idea applies to all social media platforms. You want to send out a mix of tweets to make things more interesting. This list is just some of the types to consider:

  • A famous quote to inspire
  • A quote from your own book
  • A quote from something that you’ve been reading
  • Something funny
  • A YouTube video you liked
  • A contrarian statement to stir people up and get them talking
  • A blog post or article you wrote
  • Something personal –what you had for dinner or a fun place you visited
  • An upcoming program or a product

Varying the messages ensures that you won’t turn people off when you do promote your materials. Think about it this way – if you were in a relationship with somebody you met and they were constantly trying to get you to buy something, it would be a huge turnoff right? Social media is also like reading a magazine. If it’s all ads, you wouldn’t want to read it right? There has to be enough value that relates to who you are, so when the ads show up, you don’t mind.

Social Media Attracts New Clients
At the first Gold Mastermind meeting of the Winners Academy, I asked everyone in the room who had found me on Facebook or Twitter to raise their hand. About 10% of the hands went up! Those people would never have found me if they hadn’t seen me on social media.

Build Relationships
The key is to build a relationship and to not look at it like you are selling. You are actually being of service. If you believe in your products and programs and created them to help people, then it is your divine duty to not be stingy with this resource. Get well known so you can share your solutions with as many people as possible who are up at 3:00 am struggling with what to do.

Your Client Attraction Assignment
Prepare some of your social media in advance to make things easier. Create a spread sheet for your upcoming posts with a day-by-day calendar. As you find quotes to share, save them on the sheet. Write posts to announce your programs in advance as well. Plan what days to share each item. Then supplement with spur of the moment posts like something personal, videos or articles you find, or retweet or “Like” someone else’s message on Facebook.

 

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/vdTY_5Q56f0[/youtube]

Today’s topic is about working only from your strengths. I work with all sorts of entrepreneurs: people who are just ramping up their business, people who are looking to have massive leverage in their business and people who play a really bigger game—visionaries who are creating a legacy.

Once you get to a point where you have filled your practice and have the number of clients and customers that you can handle, it’s about leveraging. One of the ways to leverage your business is to really look at what your strengths are in the business and what is the ideal team because as you start to leverage you need to bring on team members. You simply can’t do everything yourself.

One of the things that I’ve realized is that when you’re working from your strengths and only from your strengths, you actually make so much more money than if you’re doing things that you are not good at. You should not be doing anything in your business that is costing you money because you’re simply not good at it.

Another thing that I’ve realized, and this is what I coach our clients on, is that the ideal team, even if it’s you and some virtual assistants, is made up of four different categories of people. If you only have one or two of these four, you’re really missing out on multiplying your business. I want to share what those four categories are and explain to you how to set that up in your business.

1. Strategic Thinker  You’ve got to have somebody on your team that is a strategic thinker. Now, usually that’s you because you started the business. You are the one with the big vision and you are the one who can see where you want to take the business over the years. It’s really important that you be strategic about how you run your business.

A lot of people belong to mastermind groups and work with mentors so that there is that strategic thinking process going on. Even though I’m a strategic thinker I do belong to masterminds and I work with mentors to help me refine that.

2. Implementors  You must have people on the team who can implement, people who will work tirelessly to get things done. You’re going to have all this strategic thinking and big ideas and all that happening in your organization, but if you do not have people who will go implement and execute on the big ideas you will not move very fast in your business.

In fact, this is where a lot of entrepreneurs get really stuck. They’re high idea generators, but they don’t have a core group of implementors—even if it’s just you plus one other person.

3. Salesperson   You’ve got to have somebody on your team who can sell, somebody who can influence, somebody who can make things happen in that way. Why? Because you need to bring in money in your business. One of the things that I teach my clients is the closing of the sale, because if you can’t master the closing of the salesyou won’t have any clients, which means there’s no money coming in. If that’s not something that you’re good at, either learn how to get good at it, which is very, very simple if you’re taught the right way to do it or bring someone on who can do some of that selling and influencing for you.

4. Relationship builder   To have a team that works well and an organization that is set to multiply itself and to really get bigger and bigger, you must have somebody on the team who is a relationship builder, somebody who can connect with people who have empathy and compassion and can really bring harmony. This can be both within the team and with prospects and clients and vendors.

The reason the relationship-builder is very important is that once you get bigger and bigger in your company you will have more inquiries. You will have more clients, more prospects, more vendors, more strategic alliances and joint ventures and those relationships need to be built.

Usually, you will not fit in all four of these categories. If I look at what my strengths are, I fit in two of these. I have surrounded myself with other people on my team to take care of everything. When we all work from our strengths then we have a really, really solid team that can really increase every year.

When you’re looking at companies whose growth astounds you and amazes you, it’s because they have, among many other things, these four categories taken care of.

Your Client Attraction Assignment

Look at where are the gaps in your business are and determine how you can fill them if needed.

[youtube width=”600″ height=”352″]http://youtu.be/oFdYbU9i_L4[/youtube]

Heather_Habelka

Heather Habelka, Founder of Red Poppy Marketing, shares her experience as a Platinum client in the Client Attraction Winners Academy.

Prior to joining Platinum, I had just finished my second year in business and had broken the six figure mark. But, I was working around the clock, seven days a week. I was just exhausted and afraid of becoming burnt out and knew there had to be a better way to run the business.

I really didn’t have a personal life. There just wasn’t enough time for it. I have a wonderful boyfriend and friends and family, so I started looking for a better way.

I have an MBA and fifteen years of marketing experience. Coming into the Winners Academy I was learning everything that I wish I had learned in business school. It was a great present with this big red bow.  The program gave me so much opportunity and accountability and now I’m able to implement. So, for me, I’m working on increasing my revenue this year by fifty percent.

I had done a poor job of setting boundaries in the past, but to be honest, I didn’t know the right way to do that. Now, I’ve completely restructured the way that I work with my clients, and that has allowed for me to have a mutually beneficial arrangement with my clients. That’s one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from the Winners Academy to date, which is how to be very clear and to set boundaries. It’s how I confidently raised my rates.

My vision is to have a thriving fully-staffed agency, a great physical office. I’m starting to look for office space. I have the tools to get there now.

The Winners Academy coaching program has been amazing. It’s a great feeling to just know that you’re surrounded by people that understand you and they share in your struggles. It’s a great place to say, “I’m stuck. I don’t know how to do something,” and to have people be so willing to share with you what their practice is. That to me is invaluable. It has surpassed my expectations, and I would encourage anyone who is thinking of doing it to join and become part of the Winners Academy.

Often my clients come to me with a very broad group of ideal clients and need help narrowing it down. The more you get clear on who your ideal client is, the better your marketing message can speak directly to them and their concerns. This will significantly improve your marketing results as you pull clients in and they can more easily self-select to work with you.

One of the most common examples of a broad group is women. Think about women as a group – that is half the population right? So you need to narrow the field down. There are women who are moms, business owners, empty nesters, women who are divorced, addicted to sugar and the list goes on. How can you reach all these different groups of women with your marketing message without spending a fortune? That’s not easy.

The smartest way to make your marketing efforts work harder is to focus on a particular niche. I’m going to make this really easy for you. The key is to look at where women are already assembled for you. One of the best target audiences for that is women business owners. Why? Because they must gather to get more clients and grow their businesses. So when you look for groups of women business owners, it’s so much easier since they gather themselves.

There are so many places to find women business owners! Here are three national organizations:
1. National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO)
2. eWomen Network
3. National Association of Female Executives (NAFE)

There is a directory of women’s associations that’s available online and the last time I bought it, it was only $75. The directory is like a phonebook of all the women’s associations in the US and it is amazing.

You can also do a Google search in your area to discover groups that are regional or even local to just your state or town. New women’s groups and organizations are popping up all over and growing in popularity every day.

Finding these groups makes is so much easier to market to women since you can rub elbows with many all in one place. And there will likely be some of any type you seek in whatever group you attend.

Your Client Attraction Assignment
Do some research this week to discover women business owner networking groups in your area. Then make a list of everything available and when they hold their meetings. Pick the ones that sound best to you and schedule them into your calendar. Then make sure you attend.

My advice is to try a bunch of them before you settle into a routine of attending meetings. While it’s good to be seen repeatedly at the same group so people get to know and like you, it’s also helpful to make sure you find the right group with women who are receptive to what you have to offer.

 

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/3xIA2vwF1rI[/youtube]

Today’s topic is about creating a team that loves working with you. When you first start your business, you may have started from home—in a spare bedroom or a little office, and you’re just by yourself. That’s good in the beginning because you may be on a shoestring budget, but after a while as you get more and more successful, there’s just so much more to do, in terms of customer service, or in terms of doing things you don’t know how to do. If you want to grow in your business, you must begin hiring other people, whether it’s on a part-time basis of a virtual team member or a full-time person.

We now have a team of about 14 full-time employees. And what I’ve realized over the years is that your success in your business is only as good as your team. If you want to continually succeed and keep growing by leaps and bounds, you must take care of your team and hire people who are super talented, who love working with you and who will do anything to stay at the company. (Click here to tweet this.)

I believe that at Client Attraction, we are on our way to creating that kind of team. I would like to share with you some of the best practices that I’ve put together over the last three years that we’ve had full-time people working in our office with us, so here are my six tips. They may seem very simple, but hopefully you’ll find them helpful.

1. You must see yourselves as peers. Instead of seeing yourself as the big boss and that everybody else is beneath you, see yourselves as peers all on the same level.

You have your own unique strengths, skills, talents and abilities, but it is only a small piece of the puzzle. You must surround yourself with people who are really good at things that you’re not good at. When you honor them for their skills and their talents and their abilities and you see yourselves as peers working on the same mission together, everybody gets along and everybody loves working together.

2. If at all possible, have your team members only work on what they love to do and that they’re uniquely brilliant at. Like I mentioned above, you are really, really good at things that you’re really, really good at. Surround yourself with people who are exceptional at doing other things. When you have people who work only on stuff they love to do and they’re brilliant at, they will love coming to work. It’s like they’ll come to work and say, “I can’t believe I get paid to do this!” When you have a whole team that is happy and thrilled to work with you because they’re doing only what they love, you have a super productive team, and there’s no drama because everybody is so happy.

3. This is going to sound simple, but say ‘please’ and say ‘thank you’. They’re not your servants. They are your peers and they are human beings, and everybody wants to feel significant, so say please, say thank you every time you ask for something.

4. Treat them like friends and family. One of the things we do here at Clientattraction.com is we have a private chef cater lunch every day, Monday through Thursday, and we eat together as a family at this long dining room table in our office. We go around the room. It’s like breaking bread. We share this delicious, healthy meal together and we go around the room each sharing something that’s new and good every day. It really deepens the relationships. It’s one of my favorite parts of the day.

5. Respect their opinion and request their input. Team members don’t like to stay in the dark. They don’t want to be like mushrooms. They want to be part of the big picture. Share with them when you come back from a mastermind group or when you’ve read a book or you’ve gone to a seminar, come back and share with them what you learned. Share with them the bigger vision of what you’re working on. They like to be involved and remember that every single person on your team has opinions and has things that they’re really good at. Request their input and honor their opinion because it matters. It really matters if you want to create a yummy team.

6. Lastly, have fun together. It’s really important that your office be a place of abundance and beauty and respect for everyone there. The more you can have fun together during hours or off hours, the closer you will become as a team. A really close team can create anything. Really, they can create results that astound others.

See what you can do too—even if your team is all virtual. Fly everybody in and do something really fun together because when you do all of these things, it creates a team that is invincible and can do anything.

Your Client Attraction Assignment

Think about what you can do to create a space in your company where people love to work with you and they want to stay and tell others about you.

Play Big Master Class Join Fabienne and Pamela Slim for this conversation about inspiration and courage, while you discover “best practices” on how to play your own bigger game. Enjoy!

Pamela Slim is a seasoned business coach, author and professional speaker who helps frustrated employees in corporate jobs break out and start their own business. Her blog, Escape from Cubicle Nation, is one of the top career and marketing blogs on the web. A former corporate manager and entrepreneur herself for more than a decade, she deeply understands the questions and concerns faced by first-time entrepreneurs. Her expertise in personal and business change was developed through many years consulting inside corporations such as Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Charles Schwab, where she coached thousands of executives, managers and employees.

“Entrepreneurship at its heart is aligning your purpose for being on earth with a business idea so compelling that you simply must do it, despite the fears that hold you back,” says Pam. Her experience teaching martial arts for 10 years to thousands of students including former gang members has helped her clients deal with fear head-on. A world traveler, Pam speaks four languages and has lived and worked in Europe and South America.

Pam’s book Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur was named Best Small Business/Entrepreneur Book of 2009 by 800CEORead and Editor’s Choice and Reader’s Choice for Best Small Business Books of 2009 from Small Business Trends. Pam is frequently quoted as an expert on entrepreneurship in publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Money Magazine and Psychology Today. Pam is certified as a master life coach. She is married with three kids and lives in Mesa, Arizona.

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Are you building a business and in the process of attracting new clients? If you are, one very effective marketing tool to consider is the free teleclass. Why does this marketing method work so well to generate leads?

Here are six big reasons:

1. Sharing valuable content and solutions to the problem your prospects are up at 3:00 am worrying about is very enticing.
2. Giving prospects a taste of what it is like to work with you helps them decide to move forward with you.
3. Demonstrating your brilliance and expertise shows you are well versed in the help you provide.
4. Giving prospects the opportunity to get to know and like you helps them trust you.
5. Free stuff always creates a big draw for new prospects.
6. There is little or no cost to you to deliver a free teleclass. You may invest in graphics or some advertising like Facebook ads, but otherwise there is no cost.

Now that you can clearly see that free teleclasses are a worthwhile marketing tool, let’s talk about how to use them to your best advantage.

Start by creating a program that addresses one of the biggest problems your ideal clients are dealing with. This is the information they would pay anything or do anything to get their hands on. My advice is to focus on delivering “what to do” about the problem and hold off on sharing details of exactly “how to do it.” This helps you build desire to work with you.

I recommend running a free teleclass every month when you are building your practice. You can offer a different teleclass every month until you find a hot topic that really appeals to your ideal clients. Then you can deliver that same program over and over. This is what I did when I started out. Doing it this way, you focus on attracting new prospects monthly, rather than attracting the same folks each month who want more free information. Once prospects have heard the free material, they will desire more in-depth topics available in your other programs.

Your Client Attraction Assignment
Before you deliver a free teleclass, be sure to determine the action you want listeners to take at the end of the call. Do you want them to hire you as a coach, enroll in a program or buy a home study course? What is your offer? Once you decide this, you can write your script for promoting your offer at the end of the call. It’s also a good idea to mention that you have an exciting offer to share at the end to keep people on the line for the full program.

 

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/d9dTYzbyC04[/youtube]

Today’s topic is about aligning your business with your life purpose. What I see every once in a while is a business owner who has had great results for a while and then begins to lose traction or begins to stay at the same level for a few months or a few years, without continuing to grow. Or perhaps it is a business owner—maybe even you—who has become bored with their business. Maybe you don’t jump out of bed anymore to go and grow it.

When that’s the case, it’s usually a sign that perhaps it’s time to incorporate more of your life purpose into your business. In my own business, a few years ago I found that I’d done well enough, but that everyone else seemed to be growing faster than I was and I felt like I was losing traction. And I also felt like I was losing interest. (Click here to tweet this.)

I didn’t know what was going on until a friend of mine pointed out that I was doing all of these other things in my life. I was doing a lot of personal growth and development. I was doing a lot of work on mindset and learning some of the spiritual/universal principles of attraction and how things work and about getting out of your own way.

After a while, all this new work I was doing started to really create some new results in my life and especially in my business and my income, but I hadn’t shared it with my clients or in my marketing or with my students. It was a dichotomy. I was only showing one portion of what I was doing and not all of it. That is, until this friend said, “You really need to ‘out yourself’. Let people know what you’re really doing.”

So, I did a teleclass that had nothing to do with marketing. It was about how to manifest clients into your life. I talked about personal growth and manifestation and law of attraction and all of that good stuff. The response was crazy. I’d never had a response like that on any of my previous calls. People started coming out of the woodwork to work with me.

The more I started weaving this stuff into my existing business the more clients I got. Then, I started teaching mindset and teaching about how to play a much bigger game and that’s when my revenues shot past the seven-figure mark, have continued to increased since.

I have three passions—marketing, systems and mindset, which has a spiritual component to playing a bigger game and growing your business. When you align your passion with your business, all of a sudden the opportunities, the clients, the money, the meaning and fulfillment all come into your business. I believe that this is why my clients get so many great results.

Your Client Attraction Assignment

I want to see you get really clear about what your passion is in life. What is your life’s purpose? What is it that stirs your soul and that you would do for free all day long and not be resentful for it?

When you figure out what your big “Why”, start weaving it into your existing business. It could be something that you do on the side. As entrepreneurs we have the luxury of being able to marry our business with our passions. I guarantee you the more you do that, the more you are rewarded with the clients and the money and the meaning because that is why you’re here on Earth. The minute you align your passion with your business, all of the opportunities show up.

As an entrepreneur, you probably have an enormous to-do list. Even when you get an assistant, the number of tasks you need to complete can be overwhelming. Since there are more things to get done than hours in the day, that means you need to prioritize what you are doing right?

Making money is your first priority
If income is your top priority, then I recommend creating your to-do list and prioritizing each item by what will make you the most money the fastest. It’s easy really. You can find this method in chapter one of the Client Attraction Home Study System where I give you a tool to help you prioritize your to-do list.

First it helps to write everything down and then rank the things that absolutely need to be done today – because they will make you money or are focused on getting clients. These tasks are labeled “A”. Then items that will further your business and are nice to do are labeled “B”. Lastly, items that can be put off until next week can be labeled “C”.

Once everything is labeled with a letter, you can assign a priority within each grouping. So you’ll choose a task that is called “A1”, then “A2” etc. Do this for each task on the list including B1, B2, B3, C1 C2, C3, etc.

Finish one thing before you start another
Now this is sort of obvious, but the first thing you have to work on is your “A1” priority and you can’t work on anything else until it has been completed. This keeps you from getting sidetracked so you can stay focused on the money making ideas. The system comes from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and it works really well.

Don’t get sidetracked by the small stuff
What used to happen to me was, I would look at my to-do list and feel overwhelmed. I would say to myself, “Okay, let me knockoff a couple of these little things that I can get done in like five or ten minutes and then I’ll get to the big stuff.” But I never actually get to the big stuff because I kept myself busy doing the little stuff.

Discipline is the key to completing your to-dos
So, you must be disciplined about doing your A1 and only A1 until you complete it and only then you can move on to A2 or 3. And you cannot touch any of the B priorities until all the A’s are finished. I still use this principle today.

Your Client Attraction Assignment
Create your to-do list every morning. Make sure you assign a letter to each task and then number them as well. Develop the discipline to focus completely on your “A1” priority and don’t get off track until it’s finished! You can give yourself a gold star on your list or some other type of reward for following through. Although when your priority involves making money fast, that’s a big reward right there isn’t it?

 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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