Either you are teaching your clients a skill or you are teaching them a way of being.
When you are teaching a skill there are some direct outcomes and results that you can measure.
Clients have knowledge and tools to do what they need to do – it could be typing, building a website, meal planning… whatever it is, it has a practical, measurable outcome. It makes it easy to sell.
When you are teaching clients a way of being you have no way to measure the outcome quantitively and the outcome will be different for every individual. It makes it challenging to frame it as a saleable package.
This is where mainstream marketing lets you down. All the marketing talk is focused solely on approaches that work for learning a skill not a way of being. This is why I have spent so much time deconstructing the entire marketing narrative – it is not fit for purpose for transformational services.
To build your authority as a transformational leader and make the sales, you need to be coming from a different angle. Story and example demonstrate the possibilities and allow people to drop into a dreaming state where they can see themselves on the other side of the journey. If you want a good example of this, check out Shan Withnell’s article in Catalyst.
You are asking potential clients to believe in their capacity and ability to make the journey, highlighting the milestones and showcasing the transformations. It is your expertise and experience in holding that journey which inspires them to trust you to guide them. This is a very different type of marketing. It’s gentler and more nurturing which leads to clients in the right frame of mind to do the work and lets you show your brilliance off to its fullest potential.
Simply put you need to quantify your skills learning but qualify your transformational services.
In terms of business design, it is critically important to consider strategy shifts. Things can get really messy when a business offers both skill learning and transformational services under the same strategy. It is vital to adapt your strategy to build awareness of and promote different types of services and also understand how one serves the other as part of an overall journey.
Clarity around business design usually resolves these issues at the root. If you have found yourself metaphorically or literally banging your head against the wall with your marketing because of the reasons I’ve shared, you will feel a whole lot more in control if you come back to the fundamentals of business design, which will bring clarity on your focus, how your work needs to be shared and how to get it promoting itself.
If this is setting off a bell or two, drop me an
