What Are You Contributing to Your Reputation?
There are five strategies that you can use to tap into the emotions your clients want to feel when you work with them. For most businesses, you only need to use one of the strategies to build a great reputation that allows you 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, most of the coaches, speakers and trainers I work with focus on just one of the strategies to get the best results.
When you’ve discovered the best strategy or strategies for your business, you can work out how to apply it to everything you do in business – from your sales and marketing, through to your ongoing customer service.
- Certainty
- Connection
- Contribution – this is the strategy we’re looking at in this issue of Scribbles
- Growth
- Significance
If your ideal clients are looking to feel a sense of altruism, collaboration and duty from the coaches, speakers or trainers they work with, the best strategy for you could be the third one – Contribution. If they want a supplier who will help them to feel empathy and humanity, while showing them how to ‘give back’, these are other indicators of Contribution. Do they want to develop a sense of partnership when working with you? Would they like to feel that they are paying it forward and being philanthropic? Are they looking for a greater sense of purpose and responsibility? Do they feel the need to be of service, sharing and providing value?
These are all emotions and feelings that clients want to experience if Contribution 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 Contribution is the main strategy you can use to get clients and to keep clients.
Getting Clients with Contribution
When Contribution is a key strategy in your marketing, your clients want to know that you can help them to contribute to something beyond their business. They want to feel that working with you will allow them to have a much wider reach. It’s about so much more than just growing their business in order to make more money. They are looking for a much bigger purpose. They want to be known for the great work they do; and to be remembered for the legacy they will leave. They need you to help them develop their sense of purpose and direction. As their coach, the speaker they’re listening to, or the trainer they’re learning from, they want to understand how to give back and to pay it forward.
If Contribution 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 reach a much wider audience than they can reach on their own. It needs to explain how you can help get their message to more and more of the people who need to hear it. They want to work with someone who understands that there is more to running a business than just making money. They need you to help them to make a real difference in the lives of others.
Clients for whom Contribution is a key feeling when working with coaches, speakers and trainers are looking beyond their businesses, to the national, international or global impact you can help them have. Their sense of service, sharing and value are extremely high. Focus your marketing on helping your clients feel a sense of purpose and your marketing will be highly successful.
Keeping Clients with Contribution
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 Contribution 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 talking to them about their plans for their life and their business. Find out where they’re going and how many people they want to reach. What legacy do they want to leave? What’s stopping them? Talk to them about what additional support they need, because they’re looking for partnerships and collaboration from their suppliers. Challenge them to go further and to have a greater impact. Don’t let them settle for being ‘small’, but encourage them to give back to those who have already helped them along their way; push them to pay it forward to those who still need their support.
Help your clients to feel good about working with you, because the expertise you can share with them will allow them to do bigger and better things in their businesses and in their lives. Keep in touch with them on a regular basis, continually encouraging them to look for ways to develop their humanity and sense of duty. Don’t ever allow your clients to feel like you’ve forgotten them, or that they’re not incredibly important to you.
Keep clients who need Contribution by providing Contribution whenever you can. When you do, you’ll build a reputation that will attract more and more of your Contribution-seeking clients.
