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How To Really Break The Bank, Ruling Your Business With Iron Fist
By dave | February 22, 2008
This article has been written for a coaching student of mine, since I felt many of my readers are experiencing the same problems in their businesses. To keep the privacy of this client, let’s just refer to this person as J.
Previously J handed me various emails he exchanged with online business owners, sharing his expertise on making websites more profitable completely free of charge. His advice was unasked for, but really powerful and in-depth. Hence I replied back to him to charge for his time and ask his current contacts if they’d like to purchase his services.
He did so and got a response back from a woman, who was initially very pleased with his advice , turning his offer down. The woman told that she already had to much information and that she didn’t want more, at the proposed price of $100 per month.
So how to get these people to become paying customers, and what went wrong? Here’s a quick overview of the whole issue…
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
Giving advice for free is one of the best ‘baits’ for service-based companies and freelancers. They show their expertise this way and have direct one-on-one contact with the potential customer. You have a much higher chance to get a lot of testimonials and referrals thru free advice as opposed to paying clients. As soon as people pay for your time, they don’t want to do anything else for you except making the payments.
What went wrong here is that the advice didn’t came in a professional form. A slick proposal together with an immediate notice that you can hire J at $xx per hour is needed to put the ‘buying potential’ in the mind of the prospect, as well as the expectancy to not get the full service for free.
The moment you’re upfront about your motives and look professional, the more interested people will be in your services. The ‘slickness’ adds to the perceived value, and a list of regular prices makes them value and actually use the advice too.
But for every prospect that didn’t buy after seeing the immense value you have to offer, there’s something terribly lacking. It’s the power to convince and sell. Basic selling and persuasion skills are rare amongst many online marketers, but it’s the essence of it’s offline variant.
With the prospect being open to communicating with you and giving honest answers to your questions when giving advice, you’re bound to get honest rejections to your proposals. The moment you state your fees, they’ll come up with one or more excuses. Then it’s your task to convince, persuade and sell the prospect on your unique benefits.
How To Get More Paying Clients
So how do we go about selling our time or services to prospects? Actually it’s something very easy in my opinion. Once you’ve learned and used the skills for a couple of years, it’s put on autopilot. That means you don’t have to think twice, ever, to convince a prospect.
First step is to select and qualify your prospects. You don’t want to aim on people that don’t have any money to pay you, or don’t have the resources to implement your advice. On the other hand you also don’t want to aim to high, since those people most likely already have consultants and coaches.
Next is to give them an incentive to drop their defense mechanism. Providing some advice for free is a very good way, although you’ll notice not everyone likes free advice. At this point you also want to form it into a professional proposal, giving the advice together with your prices for these particular services.
Then it’s up to you to sell yourself. Most of the time these business owners aren’t really interested in you as a person, or the features and things you can add to their business. They’re interested in the benefits, like networking with you, more profits, more time off, more peace of mind, less stress and much more.
If you’re going to sell yourself as a consultant, you need to sell ‘you’. Do this by setting yourself up as the expert in your market. Give enormous value and overload them with proof it works from testimonials, case studies and your own projects. The more specifics and examples you can show, the more credible you become.
How To Make Your Clients Succeed
Making clients successful is my best-kept secret to my achievements and successes. The time and money I invest in coaching clients, by far always exceeds the fee they pay me. But in the end I make a handsome profit by making them succeed, and then using the so-called Law Of Reciprocity.
For my coaching services I only charge a few hundred dollars a month and even then I regularly give an extra discount. But the turn-over ratio is enormous. I do everything in my power to make a client succeed, and afterwards he doesn’t need me as much anymore. At that point, he helps me thru Joint Ventures and such. Plus the client keeps paying while not consuming my time anymore.
I spend a lot of time tracking the results and efforts of my coaching clients. With current technology it’s easy to track every move they make online, so I can give them advice on what they did and how they did it. Next to that I help them with setting goals and breaking those down into small easily achievable steps. Setting goals, milestones and motivating them to work on them has contributed a lot to their success.
Stop working for your clients, start motivating them to work on their business themselves. Then you can hand the tools for achieving their goals.
Why I Fired My Customers, And What Impact It Had On My Business
A lot of consultants and service providers end up with more clients then they can possibly handle. Starting out it’s not easy to attract a lot of clients, so they start marketing themselves. But they don’t stop until flooded with work. I made the same mistake.
At one point I has almost 30 coaching clients who all wanted a piece of my time, services and resources. The average time (I found this out after many tests) I need to spend on a weekly basis to make them a success, is five hours per client. Hence I was working 30 times 5 hours a week, an amazing 150 hours per week. Or at least, that’s what I was supposed to work. Of course I couldn’t keep up with it.
Then I fired almost 20 clients, and some took off by their own. They weren’t satisfied, so it could also mean the end of my business and reputation. But I did everything in my power to satisfy their final needs and wants. By doing this I immediately saved myself 100 hours of work per week.
At that point I worked 50 hours a week on my coaching clients. Still a lot, but much easier then before. In as little as 3 weeks I saw my clients achieve their first big successes. Another four clients thanked me for their help and stopped their weekly meetings and such. Another 20 hours less work needed from me.
Last but not least I outsourced a lot of the work I did behind the scenes. The stuff my clients couldn’t see but still had an impact on their coaching relationship with me. That’s how I came at my current position, working as little as 10 hours a week on making them a success - and still achieving their and my goals.
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Topics: Business Strategy, Online Marketing |
One Response to “How To Really Break The Bank, Ruling Your Business With Iron Fist”
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Chris Tackett
Posted: Feb 22nd, 2008 at 10:37 am1I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Chris Tackett