How Significant is Your Reputation?
There are five different emotional strategies you can use to assess how your clients feel when they’re working with you. For most of us, there will be one main strategy you can use to build your reputation. If you deliver a couple of different services, you can use different strategies for each. You might also notice some overlap between two different strategies within your business. However, the majority of the coaches, consultants and speakers I work with focus on one single strategy to get the best results.
When you’ve worked out the best strategy (or strategies) for your business, you can look at how to apply the right marketing tactics to win new clients and also keep them with you.
- Certainty
- Connection
- Contribution
- Growth
- Significance – this is the strategy we’re looking at in this issue of Scribbles
If your ideal clients want to feel admired, appreciated and ‘bigger’ when they work with you, the best strategy for you could be Significance. If they want a coach, consultant or speaker who will help them to feel a sense of belonging, courage and dignity, while helping them to feel brand new, these are other indicators of Significance. Are they looking to be enabled, heard and more impactful? Do they need to be loved, noticed and recognised by you and by others? Do they want to work with someone who can give them a high level of respect, and who helps them to feel special?
Some people want to feel understood, more visible and worthwhile in their work and relationships. These are the emotions and feelings that they want to experience if Significance 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 Significance is the main strategy you can use to get clients and keep clients.
Getting Clients with Significance
When Significance is a key strategy in your marketing, your clients want to know that you can help them to stand up, speak out and have a bigger impact – in their business or in their career. They need a cheerleader who can back them all the way, encouraging them to do more, no matter how tough the going gets.
If Significance is the best strategy for your coaching, speaking or training business, the marketing you use needs to show prospects how working with you can help them to be seen and to be heard. No matter how introverted or extroverted your clients might be, your marketing needs to give them the courage and dignity they crave. Show them how you will support them to find their voice and then how to use it for the best impact. Tell them how you can work with them to find the respect and recognition they desire.
Clients for whom Significance is a key feeling when working with coaches, consultants and speakers, are on their way to somewhere better. They need your support to help them get there. They want to feel understood and worthwhile – by their clients or by their work colleagues. The starting point on their journey is for you to show them how to feel understood and worthwhile. Focus your marketing on the impact your clients can make and your marketing will be highly successful.
Keeping Clients with Significance
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 Significance 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. Keep encouraging them to find their voice and to use it, to create the impact they want to make. Show them, on a regular basis, how much respect and recognition they already command – and how much bigger they could be. Challenge them to go beyond their comfort zone.
To build long-term relationships with your Significance clients, it’s vital that you keep pushing them in the right direction. Don’t let them hide when it gets too difficult. Don’t let them settle for less when you know they are capable of so much more. Always listen to them, so they feel truly heard. They might not like you initially for encouraging them to stand up and be counted, but they will eventually love you for being their cheerleader.
Keep clients who need Significance by providing Significance whenever you can. When you do, you’ll build a reputation that will attract more and more of your Significance-seeking clients.
