One of my favourite questions to ask people when I begin to work with them is, “Why do you do what you do?”
I am always curious as to how many of my clients decided to become a healer, coach, practitioner or any multiple forms of transformational service professionals. (You know someone who helps create possibility for positive change in someone’s life.)
Typically, I get one of two responses. There is the “I have always been interested in x, y, and z so I pursued it as a career to help people.” Or I get the response, “Because I struggled with x, y, and z and found help with this technique or through this profession so I wanted to do to the same for others.”
Either way, in the end a business was born out of an interest to serve people in a way that had the potential to transform people’s lives.
As noble as that these reasons are they, they alone will not sustain a business without two key ingredients:
* Clarifying the bigger WHY within your marketing message,
* Positioning how you are uniquely qualified for your services.
Your service alone won’t necessarily inspire people to take action to work with you, however your bigger WHY of your work will. Being able to clearly share the intangible values of your services is really where the sweet spot will happen. What I have discovered is the deeper the purpose for wanting to step into your specific field of work often is tied into a core value people experience when working with you.
When I started to offer marketing services I knew that I loved working with transformational service professionals because I had a deep connection to holistic expression and living. These types of business owners came to me to help them with their marketing, copywriting, website design, and ezines because I had the ability to help them convey their work effectively with my marketing services.
However, after having a number of clients say to me that I helped them capture the unique voice of their business, did I really begin to understand the deeper intangible value that I gave them – it was the clarity and confidence to really step into their work based on how I viewed the significance of their ability to help people from a more holistic level. This at some level provided greater value for their clients because I was able to capture the power of their work in a way that was hard for them to really see alone on their own.
Their confidence when we aligned their core value in their marketing message was highly attractive and helped them to really see the richer and deeper value people received from them.
Now the second piece to this puzzle challenges the idea of targeting not a market of people as potential clients, but in positioning your service in terms of solving very specific issues and problems. By demonstrating that you really understand the challenges people face who are dealing with the problems you are truly qualified in helping, you become more valuable to people, and dare I say…an expert.
Having this position do not require permission from other people to claim your expertise status either. As an entrepreneur it’s a promotion you can give yourself. Just make sure you meet these requirements to do so:
1. You must really understand the value of the service you offer. People do not only go to an expert because they have specialized knowledge. There is an intrinsic value of trust that is perceived and comes with the status of expertise because there is a depth of experience and understanding around the specifics of the topic one is an expert in.
The difference here would look like this, a service offered to someone with head trauma going to a walk-in clinic with general practitioners may be good but not as in-depth or effective versus a specialized neurosurgeon whose primary focus is on the intricate healing and recovery of head traumas.
Experts specialize in problems. Then from there, they work with the people who struggle with these problems that they can help-these become their ideal clients. Often because you can get better results this way, it’s easier to create raving fans and a following of supportive clients who refer to you.
2. Experts always have a mission. They are specialized for a reason and are curious to uncover, solve, divulge, or transform a set of problems related to the area of expertise they work in. Generalists accommodate the needs of everybody which can cause uncertainty in people as to the level of qualified trust. There just is a deeper sense of trust with being an expert. I believe this is due to the fact experts devote their time to the specifics and it shows in the knowledge of solving problems.
My coaches request to you, if you still are wondering how to find your why and you wonder what it’s going to take to gain traction in client building, I would bet that one or both of these issues is tripping up your efforts.
However until you openly claim your mission to serve at a deeper level and then use this within your authentic marketing practices you tend to ‘look’ much like other business that offer the same services you do.
I know for myself, digging deeper to understand my bigger why and how to position this in my business connected my unique offerings with how
I communicated it in my marketing. Now prospects and ideal clients experience greater value in my work because my message is no longer lost in the crowd.
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