3 Reasons to Be a Go-To Guy or Gal

A go-to person is someone who is knowledgeable, resource-full, generous of spirit, and enjoys being helpful without coming across as constantly pushing their own services and products with high pressure sales tactics. It may be a natural personality characteristic, but it's also a great marketing strategy.


Reason #1: It draws more ideal prospects to your door.

Prospective clients -- people who fit our ideal client profile but may not yet be ready to seek our services -- do like to window shop. It's human nature. And everyone likes to get something for nothing, or find a bargain. People naturally seek additional information from former sources, and tend to hire providers with whom they have already created a kind of psychological bond. When we establish ourselves as knowledgeable, generous sources of helpful information is creates rapport and loyalty between you and the prospect.


Reason #2: It keeps the energetic attraction magnet working for you.

There's a metaphysical principle that what you put out comes back to you three fold -- another way to state one of the laws of attraction. Being helpful and generous with your time and information, we invite to us people who will surprise us with referrals and opportunities to take our work into realms we may not have thought of. Becoming known as the go-to person in our area of expertise is like fueling up the lighthouse beacon -- energy flows brightly from us, and unexpected rewards know where to find us.


Reason#3: It deepens your credibility, and others' trust in you.

Giving away some degree of help and information puts our priority on being of service. It furthers the know you, like, you, trust you factor that makes people feel it's safe to trust us with their secrets, fears, and vulnerabilities. In sales terms, it's a try-before-you-buy offer or test drive to determine fit, function, worth of our paid professional services. In other words, it's good business because it helps establish the credibility of our services.


Coaching question:
What area of your professional interests will you because the go-to person for?

Fear, Flow, and Focus

Are your client attraction efforts propelled by fear? How many of these fears can you relate to:

• Fear of not being visible enough to prospective clients?
• Fear of being too visible and drawing people who are wrong for your practice?
• Fear of not doing enough marketing, so you do a little of everything?
• Fear of not doing the right marketing, so you feel paralyzed or overwhelmed?
• Fear of losing traction, so you get caught up in frantically searching for more ways to promote your business?
• Fear of marketing taking over your life, so resistance comes up and prevents doing any at all?
• Fear of looking or sounding unprofessional, silly, stupid, or sleazy?

Having to combat such fears makes it all the more difficult to produce an effective, compelling, client attracting marketing message. A confident mindset with a good amount of belief in yourself is absolutely essential to the success of any self-promotion strategy.

I highly recommend having some strong techniques for feeling the fear and promoting your business anyway. That should include confident self-talk, an accountability partner, and a step by step system to persistently follow.

Many of us by nature or training value being in a "flow" state of mind, where we've heard that high creativity exists. There's nothing wrong with that when we need to generate new ideas or produce a specific product. How that often plays out for marketing a private practice, though, can look like this:

• dabbling at many marketing actions, mastering and following through on few
• interacting with your business as if it were a hobby
• scattering your energies with disconnected approaches to spreading the word about your services
• starting the business day waiting for inspiration, energy, or motivation to strike
• flitting from one strategy to the next without giving each enough time to produce results
• constantly reinventing the wheel, or being terminally "unique" in promoting your practice
  

Approaching marketing with this kind of scatteredness is exhausting and expensive for us, and confusing for potential clients. Worse, it sends a subtle message that we don't quite know what we're doing if we aren't consistent with how we market to prospective clients.

I recommend making the best use of the flow state when needing to brainstorm, when wanting to immerse yourself in a creative process, and in visualizing success everyday.

If I could make just one point about client attraction it would be that FOCUS is the big secret. What focus looks like is:

• making the health of your business a priority on your schedule everyday
  
• a well defined understanding of your ideal client
• an emotionally compelling marketing message
  
• a limited number of effective ways to fill your pipeline, get referrals, present yourself and get hired
  
• a small set of easy, fun, productive action steps taken every day
  

Focus includes defining, detailing, planning, following through, evaluating, and adjusting. It often sounds like a lot of work, but getting systematic about it makes it very easy, efficient, and really produces client attraction results.

I recommend setting aside time everyday to tend your business in a focused way with clear, measurable action steps that lead to achievable goals.

Why Does Promoting Your Business Feel Sleezy?

Look at me, I'm great, I'm so educated, I have tons of tools, I can do this for you, I can do that -- me, me, me. That's the idea that many coaches and counselors have about what marketing is.

Or -- YOU can be sexier, thinner, more confident, happier, make more money than Ever before, just one hour a week is all it takes and all your troubles will be gone, hurry hurry don't delay, this offer expires today, this chance won't come again, if you want the life you've already dreamed of, act now. Ugh, can you feel the slime rolling down your arms just reading that?

No wonder it feels sleezy to promote yourself and your solo practice.

Leaving aside the comforting fact that neither of those two approaches to late night guru fitness systems and ginzu knife promotions work for professionals in the healing and optimal performance arts, the deeper issue is that they touch us where we are raw -- in our self esteem, belief in our abilities to do our work well, or our lack of ease with feeling in the spotlight.

I want to pass along to you one of the most valuable things that was ever said to me when I was voicing the feeling of being not as good as the next therapist:

• Your clients chose you because they intuitively knew that you were the best helper for them, and it's an insult to them to not have the same belief in yourself that they do. They are trusting you, and you must return their trust by trusting yourself.
  

If you struggle with feeling not good enough -- whether it's an underlying personality pattern or a misplaced acknowledgment of being new in practice -- it is vital to the health of your business that you work on believing in and trusting your abilities.

When you believe in your abilities you won't need to put yourself in the forefront of your marketing message. When you deeply trust yourself to provide the help that your clients seek, you'll focus your marketing message on them, not on yourself.

If you already believe in and trust yourself, it can become easy and comfortable to promote your business without feeling like it's sleezy because you can approach it from the sense of being in service to your clients and their goals.

Isn't that the core of why we wanted to be a counselor, coach or ND in the first place?

What Stops You?

Have you ever made a marketing plan that sounded good in your head or on paper, and discovered when you tried to put it into action that you have trouble forcing yourself into carrying out some of the items?

I developed a new marketing plan for a specific new project of mine this week, and have already found a pitfall.

Seems that what I thought I needed to do is requiring more effort to talk myself into than I anticipated. Does that happen to you?

What's the solution?

It's probably not the idea itself that's faulty. It's the assumptions behind it that haven't been completely made conscious, or thoroughly examined.

Sometimes it's the shoulds that get us. My pitfall action item is a should -- I thought I should attend more networking groups. But I hate those. I assume I'll feel awkward, I believe I won't know what to say. That brings up sabotaging fear. I reschedule, postpone, make excuses not to go.

Re-examining that should I remember that social networking isn't my strength. It's never going to be easy, I think. I'm never going to like it. Hmm, two more assumptions. Are they really true?

Will I be stopped on my road to achieving my goals by these assumptions? How can I coach myself (and you, if you're on the Should and Assumption road) out of this pitfall?

I ask myself (and you):

• When you've felt awkward and scared before, what did you do to overcome it?
  

I took flower essence remedy Madia to strengthen my communication ability, and created a mental mantra to reinforce the sense of feeling comfortable, having fun, feeling accepted by strangers.

• How can I make it easy?

I can start with small or purpose-focused groups, like workshops instead of meet and greets. That's easier because I can mostly listen. The pressure is off to talk about myself.

• What do I need to experience so that I can like it, and how can I manifest that?
  

I need to feel a sense of comfort, belonging, and control. I can manifest that with convenient time and place, getting there without traffic, imagining being / playing the role of an extrovert, making a game of how many names I can remember or cards I can collect, being able to leave when I want, using my interviewing skills to start conversations, etc.

What about you? How have you gotten beyond being stopped before? How can you make it easy? What do you need to experience, and how can you manifest that?