Book Yourself Solid for Coaches and Consultants (eBook)

The Fastest, Easiest, Most Reliable System for Getting More Clients Than You Can Handle, Even if You Hate Marketing and Selling

Matthew Kimberley, Michael Port (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
304 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-1-394-22569-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Build your consulting clientele with self-promotion strategies that really work

Book Yourself Solid for Coaches and Consultants is a game changing guide to attracting potential business opportunities and turning them into high-paying gigs, for a solid business foundation. This hyper-targeted, step-by-step advice will help you grow your coaching or consulting practice beyond what you previously thought possible. You'll become inspired to put energy behind your self-promotion practices-even if self-promotion isn't really your thing. In any service business, it's essential to connect with the clients who are a perfect fit for you. For consultants, that means making your marketing efforts more effective by understanding your unique brand, pricing your services competitively, and communicating with prospective clients about how you can help them. This book helps you through all of it, with practical tips and strategic insights to ensure that you're never short on the right kind of clients.

Co-authored by Michael Port (mastermind behind the original Book Yourself Solid business techniques) and Matthew Kimberley (successful business consultant), Book Yourself Solid for Coaches and Consultants covers the issues unique to the world of coaching. By attracting clients who are in alignment with your vision, you can create a successful business that also helps you achieve your long-term goals.

• Understand your unique value proposition and brand, and learn how to talk about it
• Create a likeable social media presence and a website that brings people in the door
• Learn step-by-step strategies for networking, direct outreach, generating referrals, and more
• Discover how the principles of sales and pricing apply to building your consulting practice

Book Yourself Solid for Coaches and Consultants is a handbook that translates into results. Promote more than just your skills by creating an image that will resonate with your ideal clientele-and keep you booked solid.

MICHAEL PORT is a bestselling author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of Heroic Public Speaking HQ, a performance training center that develops and nurtures the next generation of professional speakers, CEOs, founders, authors, business owners, and movement leaders.

MATTHEW KIMBERLEY is a successful business coach and current CEO of Book Yourself Solid Worldwide. He has worked with thousands of coaches and consultants across industries, helping them book more business with practical advice and guidance.

Textauszug

CHAPTER 1
The Red Velvet Rope Policy

He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.

—Raymond Hull

Imagine that a friend has invited you to accompany her to an invitation-only special event. You arrive and approach the door, surprised to find a red velvet rope stretched between two shiny brass poles. A nicely dressed man asks your name, checking his invitation list. Finding your name there, he flashes a wide grin and drops one end of the rope, allowing you to pass through and enter the party. You feel like a star.

Do you have your own red velvet rope policy that allows in only the most ideal clients, the ones who energize and inspire you? If you don’t, you will shortly. Why?

First, because when you work with coaching clients you love, you’ll truly enjoy the work you’re doing; you’ll love every minute of it. (Well, almost every minute of it. It is work, after all.) And when you love the work you do, you’ll do your best work, which is essential to booking yourself solid.

Second, because you are your clients. They are an expression and an extension of you. Do you remember when you were a teenager and your mother or father would give you a hard time about someone you were hanging out with? Your parents may have said that a particular kid was a bad influence. As a teen, you may have thought about how unfair that felt, but the truth is that you are the company you keep. The people you spend time with, make a significant impact on your state of mind and how you feel about yourself. Let this be the imperative of your business: choose your clients as carefully as you choose your friends. This is of critical importance in a coaching business because of the deep bond you will have with the clients you are serving.

The first step in building your foundation is to choose your ideal clients, the individuals or businesses with whom you do your best work, the people or environments that energize and inspire you. I’m going to help you identify specific characteristics of individuals or organizations that would make them ideal to work with. You will then develop a rigorous screening process to find more of them. I’m also going to help you prune your current client list of less-than-ideal clients.

When I began my coaching business I would work with anyone who had a pulse and a checkbook. Then I began to consider what it would mean to choose my clients. What it would mean to work only with clients who were ideal for me. And thank goodness I did. Now I live by what I call the Red Velvet Rope Policy of ideal clients. It increases my productivity and my happiness, it enables me to do my best work, and I have more clients and referrals than I can handle by myself. And so will you.

For maximum joy, prosperity, and abundance, think about the person you are when you are performing optimally, when you are with all the people who inspire and energize you. Now think about all of the frustration, tension, and anxiety you feel when you work with clients who are less than ideal—not so good, right?

Wouldn’t it be great to spend every day working with clients who are ideal for you, clients whom you can hardly believe you get paid to work with? This ideal is completely possible once you identify with whom you want to work and determine with certainty that you will settle for nothing less. Once you do that, it’s just a matter of knowing which of your existing clients qualify and how to acquire more just like them.

1.1.1 Written Exercise: To begin to identify the types of clients you don’t want, consider which characteristics or behaviors you refuse to tolerate. What turns you off or shuts you down? What kinds of people should not be getting past the red velvet rope that protects you and your business?

Dump the Duds

Let’s take this a step further. I suggest you dump your dud clients. I can just hear your shocked protestations and exclamations. “I thought this was a book about getting clients, not dumping them!” I’m referring to the dud clients—not all of your clients. It sounds harsh, but think about it. Your dud clients are those you dread interacting with, who drain the life out of you, bore you to tears, frustrate you, or worse, instill in you the desire to do them—or yourself—bodily harm, despite your loving nature.

You might think that because you’re in the business of making people (and companies) better that you have an obligation to work with dud clients until they’re not dud clients, but that’s a fallacy. The best coaches in the world work with the most motivated clients. Think about highly paid sports coaches or million-dollar executive coaches. The higher the quality of the client (which is of course a subjective measure), the greater the impact the coach can achieve.

I’m well aware of the many reasons you think you can’t dump your dud clients, and I know this can seem really scary early on, but hang in there with me. Embrace the concept and trust that this is sound advice from a loving teacher and a necessary step on the path to booking yourself solid.

Why have clients, or anyone for that matter, in your life who zap your energy and leave you feeling empty? In the first year of being in business on my own, I cut 10 clients in one week. It wasn’t easy. It required a major leap of faith, but the emotional and financial rewards were astonishing. Within three months, I had replaced all 10 and added 6 more. Not only did I increase my revenue but I also felt more peaceful and calm than I ever had before, and I enjoyed my clients and my work more.

When I asked myself the question, “Would I rather spend my days working with incredibly amazing, exciting, super cool, awesome people who are both clients and friends, or spend one more agonizing, excruciating minute working with barely tolerable clients who suck the life out me?” I had no choice. I knew the temporary financial loss would be worth the payoff.

I know using the phrase “dump your dud clients” suggests that there is something wrong with them. But that’s not necessarily the case. Well, in some cases you may have a real problem client on your hands, but most of the time, they’re just not right for you. Clients who are not ideal for you could be ideal for someone else. I like using the phrase “dump your duds” because it might make you uncomfortable. It also trips nicely off the tongue.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to create conflict and fire clients. You just need to help them find a better fit. You can be tactful, diplomatic, and loving. You can even attempt, when appropriate, to refer them to a colleague who might be a better fit. Whenever possible, keep it simple. Try, “I’m not the best person to serve you.” Or “I don’t think we’d be a good fit.”

Are you always going to get a positive response when dumping your dud clients? Maybe not. If the first thing that comes to mind is, “I don’t want anyone out there thinking badly of me,” I’m with you. I want everyone to love me, too. But living life fully can require difficult conversations and you can’t please everyone. To even try is an exercise in futility, as the following Aesop fable demonstrates.

The Old Man, the Little Boy, and the Donkey

An old man, a little boy, and a donkey were going to town. The little boy rode on the donkey and the old man walked beside him. As they went along, they passed some people who remarked it was a shame the old man was walking and the little boy was riding. The man and boy thought maybe the critics were right, so they changed positions.

Later, they passed some people who remarked, “What a shame! He makes that little boy walk.” They then decided they both would walk.

Soon they passed some more people who thought they were stupid to walk when they had a decent donkey to ride. So they both rode the donkey. Later, they passed some people who shamed them by saying how awful to put such a load on a poor donkey. The boy and man said they were probably right, so they decided to carry the donkey. As they crossed the bridge, they lost their grip on the animal. He fell into the river and drowned.

The moral of the story? If you try to please everyone, you might as well kiss your ass goodbye.

When considering whom you want to work with, look for qualities in a person with whom you resonate, so don’t limit yourself to just thinking about the clients you don’t yet have. Your Red Velvet Rope Policy is a filtration system that lets in ideal clients. However, you can choose to loosen or tighten the rope at will. I’m not (necessarily) asking you to turn away your very first clients. I understand what you’re up against. When you start your business, if you feel that you’d like to keep your red velvet rope a little looser so you can work with more clients, go right ahead.

Just make sure you know what is ideal and what isn’t ideal about the people you’re letting into the VIP room. As you become booked solid, you’ll tighten your red velvet rope and become even more exclusive so as to work only with those who energize and inspire you—and most important—enable you to do your best work.

1.1.2 Written Exercise: Now take a good, hard look at your current clients. Be...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.9.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Marketing / Vertrieb
• ISBN-10: 1-394-22569-5 / 1394225695
• ISBN-13: 978-1-394-22569-9 / 9781394225699