How Can You Connect to the Right Reputation?
While here are five strategies for you to consider, most businesses only need to use one of them, to build a great reputation that allows them to get and keep ideal clients. If you deliver more than one service in your business, you might use different strategies for your different services. You might also have one main strategy with some overlap from another one. However, the majority of the coaches, speakers and trainers I’ve worked with focus on just one of the strategies to get the best results.
When you’ve worked out the best strategy for your business, you can work out how to apply it to everything you do in business, for marketing to potential clients and also in your customer service.
- Certainty
- Connection – this is the strategy we’re looking at in this issue of Scribbles
- Contribution
- Growth
- Significance
If your ideal clients are looking to feel appreciated, a sense of belonging and connectedness from the coaches, speakers or trainers they work with, the best strategy for you could be the second one on the list – Connection. If they want a supplier who will help them to feel empathy, friendship and harmony, these are other indicators of Connection. Do they want to develop a sense of meaning and direction as a result of working with you? Would they like to feel part of something bigger – a group or ‘family’ – and to be recognised, knowing that your advice will deliver this to them? Does working with you give them a sense of respect? Do they want to feel valued every time they speak to you?
These are all emotions and feelings that clients want to experience if Connection is important to them. If your current clients use these words to describe being coached by you, listening to you speak, or being trained by you, then Connection is the main strategy you can use to get clients and to keep clients.
Getting Clients with Connection
When Connection is a key strategy in your marketing, your clients want to know that you can introduce them to the people and businesses they need to meet, so they can develop themselves or their business. They’re looking for suppliers who can help with the expansion of their lives and businesses, pointing them in new directions and helping them to be recognised. They want to feel that they are part of something bigger, like an association or ‘tribe’. They need to learn how to build the best relationships.
I must point out here that Connection as a marketing strategy is not about creating a connection with your potential clients. You need to have a great level of connection with your prospects, regardless of which strategy you use to attract them. This Connection is about what your clients want to feel when they’re working with you. They need to feel respected and valued. They want you to show them how they can build the relationships they need, to overcome their business challenges. Teach them about the power of reciprocity and they will love working with you.
If Connection is the best strategy for your coaching, speaking or training business, the marketing you use needs to show prospects how working with you can expand their network of support. Invite them to join your ‘community’ and tell them that you can introduce them to like-minded people.
Clients for whom Connection is a key feeling when working with coaches, speakers and trainers, are looking beyond you, to the people you know, to whom you can introduce them. Give them a sense of belonging to a tribe, a family, a group – or whatever you want to call it – and they will book you for coaching, speaking or training.
Keeping Clients with Connection
Winning new clients is only the first half of successful marketing and developing a sustainable business. You also need to keep your clients, building long term relationships with them. You want them to keep buying from you, and to keep recommending your services to other clients.
Once you’ve brought new clients into your business using the Connection strategy, you can use it to keep them. Do this by focusing on the same feelings and emotions they want to experience when you first speak to them. Introduce your clients to other people who can help them – even if those people are your competitors. Clients who want to feel Connection are happy to network with their own competitors too, as they know that there is enough work for everyone. They know that they can always learn more from the competition.
Look at their business challenges on a regular basis and suggest other people with whom they could work. When a client asks for a recommendation to another supplier, put them in touch with the best person. Don’t try to do the work yourself. Finding a specialist to work with your client will allow you to keep them as a client, building up a much stronger, longer lasting relationship. They will respect you much more – this is important as respect is something your clients want to feel on a regular basis.
To keep your clients coming back, look for ways in which you can keep delivering the sense of belonging and connectedness that they need. Develop tools that allow your clients to network with other people – this could include running events or compiling a directory of resources they can access. Ask your clients regularly who else they need to meet – in terms of clients and suppliers – and then look for those people. Be generous in who you introduce them to. Don’t just recommend a supplier because they’ll pay you commission for the introduction. It’s better to earn the trust and appreciation of your client than to earn a referral fee.
Build a solid community that your clients want to be part of and they will remain a member of that community – and be one of your clients – for the long haul. Keep clients who need Connection by providing Connection whenever you can. When you do, you’ll build a reputation that will attract more and more of your Connection-seeking clients.
