Take Advice

One of our mentees is a chartered accountant. She’s also a fabulous Financial Coach. Before she started her mentoring programme, she wanted to find the most cost-effective way of building her business and so she did a costs/benefits analysis and came to this conclusion:

It’s far less expensive (in terms of both time and money) to take the advice from those who have achieved what I wanted to achieve rather than trying to go it alone from a position of enthusiasm, but little knowledge.

Confusion Around Making Marketing Cost-Effective

Niches, Ideal Clients And Marketing Messages. These are all terms that mean different things to different people. I don’t mean to sound patronising here, but I’ve had enough conversations with different folk to know that there are a number of variations in definition. Sadly, with variety comes confusion.

I also know that those coaches who do this work alone, often fail to get anything like the detail that they need to have in order to be successful. Just based on comments on one of the articles I’ve written on LinkedIn (here if you’re interested), I know that the ideal client work needs to be far more detailed than most people realise. We get comments like this:

Gosh – I had no idea I needed to get that detailed! Back to the drawing board for me.

The way our mentoring process works is that our mentees start to work on their Ideal Client Avatar (ICA) in their very first session. This work needs doing in order that the rest of the work can follow. Put another way, you can’t define and refine your marketing message, without knowing exactly at whom it is aimed. If you start with the marketing message, you are truly putting the horse before the cart.

We work with our mentees to define who before they start to refine what to say. By the time they have reached 5 sessions, they have an ICA and a marketing message that speaks directly to that ICA and explains the benefits to the ICA of working with that particular coach.

Every coach and therefore every marketing message is different….. Don’t trust proven marketing systems, where there’s one message that many coaches deliver – they just don’t work.

We’re Making Waves

I know that there are organisations who watch us very carefully to see what we’re doing. I know of two that have changed what they teach their members to reflect what we’re doing, because they see the level of success that our mentees achieve – and their members are not achieving anywhere near as much. Imitation is of course, the sincerest form of flattery.

If you’d like to make your own waves, business-wise, why not book an appointment in my diary and I’ll give you a call? You’ll find it here.