Personal Coaching Programme – part 3

Today I give you a little more detail about the coaching programme.

What’s the difference between coaching and mentoring? Let’s take a look at the dictionary definition.

Mentoring: Serve as a teacher or trusted counsellor.
Coaching: Teach and supervise (someone); act as a trainer or coach (to).

As you can see it’s very subtle, and one of my friends says that a good coach mentors and a good mentor coaches. I think the defining word between the two here is “supervise”.

I really could have done with some supervison when I first started. I had lots of false starts (wasted a lot of time), and I made lots of mistakes (not such a bad thing as you might think) and didn’t really know what I wanted at the end. I had no definition.

Another one of my friends says “begin with the end in mind” – if you know what you really want and have a clear definition of it, then it affects the way you do everything. You feel excited, invigorated and motivated.

When you feel like that, it doesn’t feel like work. You have a clear goal, and it becomes simple to dismiss those things that don’t achieve that goal, and simple to pursue the things that do.

What I intend to do with you when you join the programme is first have a chat and find out what it is that you want. In that process, my guess is I’ll help you get to the point where you realise that what you want isn’t really what you want.

Example: I thought I wanted just to be able to work from home.

Well, it’s really nice to be able to do that, but I later realised that what I really wanted was freedom from being told what to do. I also realised that what I wanted was to be able to control my own income.

True story time. One December more than a decade ago (when I was an employee), at the end of that year (a grueling year for me as I’d really put my heart and soul into the project I was working on), I was called into my boss’s boss’s office. This guy was two levels up from me, he was middle management, one step down from a director, just so you know.

I was told that it was performance review time. I was told that I wasn’t going to get a pay rise because there wasn’t enough in the pot, and it had been decided to give more to other people, and so some people weren’t going to get a rise, and I was one of them.

I was upset.

I asked what it was that I had done or hadn’t done that meant I wasn’t going to get a pay rise, so that I could make sure it never happened again. He couldn’t answer me.

I also asked why it had been left until the end of the year to tell me that I wasn’t performing and so didn’t get a pay rise. He couldn’t answer that either.

I asked if there was any point in continuing the conversation because he didn’t seem to know anything about what he’d called me in to discuss. He said no there wasn’t and so I walked out.

When I talked to my own boss about what had happened, he said it was a totally arbitrary decision and had no meaning other than it was a directive that had come down from the CEO. Yes, my boss actually knew something about it. He also said there wasn’t a damn thing either of us could do about it – the same thing had happened to him.

Neither of us had any control over our income. It didn’t matter how hard or smart we worked (or didn’t), it had no effect on our earnings.

Isn’t that insane?

And yet that’s the situation that the majority of people are in BY CHOICE.

Now of course it’s all different for me. I get to make the decisions, and my actions decide how much I’m going to earn.

It’s scary, but it’s exhilarating.

So the first thing I’ll do when you sign up is arrange a one on one chat with you to find out what it is you really want, and where your skills are. We’ll outline a plan of action, and then we’ll put something together for you that’s more detailed.

Real simple stuff, nothing complicated, nothing scary. And we’ll take it from there.

Okay?

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I also said I’d mention the marketing funnel today, so let’s have a quick run through that.

Picture a funnel with the widest part at the top. The people that are outside that funnel are “suspects”. They may or may not be interested in what you have to offer, and they may or may not become your customer.

Now imagine that the “suspects” are entering that funnel by signing up to your mailing list. Once they sign up, they’ve now become your “prospects”. Now the chance of them becoming a customer of yours has greatly increased. It may be that no money has changed hands yet, or maybe a token amount such as less than $5.

Once they’re in the top part of the funnel, you can make them an offer. It’s a good idea for it to be a low cost, high perceived value offer, somewhere between $17 and $37.

If they buy this, and other similar items from you, then you now know you have someone you can make larger offers to, say $67 – $127, and have a good chance of them being accepted. They’re now your customer and they’ve moved well into the marketing funnel.

It’s a lot easier to sell to an existing customer than a new one. They now know you and they know your products are excellent. The price starts to become irrelevant to them. But there are much fewer of those people than there are of your prospects.

The funnel is getting narrower to accommodate them. And you can make even higher value offers to them.

If they take those larger offers, then you can now be certain that you have a customer for life, although of course you can blow it completely if you’re not careful!

The higher priced offers must have tremendous perceived and actual value behind them. The benefits must be clear and must outweigh the cost by a large margin.

This continues on, down and down, until you have just a trickle of customers buying the very high value items, at the very bottom of the funnel. You may now be in the $10,000 to $20,000 price bracket.

Does it sound so hard to do that? Does that seem to be so daunting? It shouldn’t do. You don’t have to do it all over night.

You can build up to it over several years if you want to, there’s no rule that says you shouldn’t start if you don’t have the bottom of the funnel ready.

The problem is, many businesses don’t get past the first offer. They either have only one product to offer, or continue to make similar value offers for other products and don’t go to the next step.

That’s fine to do, and by all means have several products in the same price bracket, because the wider your funnel, the more higher value customers will move down it and purchase your bigger products.

But don’t get stuck at the low end products and think that people will only ever buy low value items. You’d be doing yourself an extreme disservice.

There are a lot of people out there with wads of cash in their pockets, more people than you might think, and what you need is a plan to get yourself to the point where you can make those large value offers to them.

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Right! That’s today done.

Tomorrow I’ll give you a quick glimpse inside my Aweber account. When you take a look, I’ll point out how quickly you can build your list if you know what to do, and how I’ve been a bit slow on that front, and what I’ll be doing in 2008 to fix it.

Remember: more prospects = more customers = more money.