SERVICE MARKETING(tm)
Ben Dean, Ph.D., MCC http://www.mentorcoach.com

Most helping professionals can master coaching skills. If you like helping others, you find coaching to be fun and fulfilling.  But even experienced professionals can often have difficulty marketing their fledgling coaching practices.

There are four keys to building a successful coaching practice:

(1)  Building strong, nuanced skills for coaching both individuals and groups

(2) Having an overall approach to marketing that is both congruent with your personality and effective;

(3) Carrying that approach out; and

(4) Being able to ‘lean into’ your marketing activities with conviction.

I believe that approaching your coaching business development from the standpoint of ‘Service Marketing’  is an effective strategy and frees you to do #4 above. 

NOTE:  ‘Service Marketing’ is, of course, inspired by the work of Robert Greenleaf.  I recommend highly his books: ‘Servant Leadership: A Journey Into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness’ and ‘On Becoming a Servant-Leader.’

SERVICE MARKETING—THE STORY

Almost all clinicians/helping professionals can master individual and group coaching skills. 

And almost all helping professionals find coaching to be fulfilling. 

Yet many of these same talented individuals find the *marketing* of their coaching practices to be a distasteful, elusive and difficult enterprise.

This is due, in part, to our values.  Most of us enjoy helping others, healing others, empowering others.

Our values are different from those of other professionals such as MBA students or real estate salespeople or options traders.  They are less conflicted about marketing.

We are uncomfortable with marketing because it seems to be so self centered and involved with self promotion. It feels ‘bad’ to sell ourselves or our services.

‘Service Marketing’(tm)—viewing the activity of marketing as being primarily about serving the world—is a freeing and surprisingly effective approach to serving others while building a coaching practice.

Service marketing means serving the universe of your prospects as if they were already your clients—even though most of them will never become your clients.

Service marketing means evaluating marketing options,  first, in terms of how they can help others, and, only secondarily, in how they will attract clients to your coaching practice.

Service marketing means you will almost never fail in your marketing activities.  A given approach may or may not result immediately in new clients, but you can always design it so as to be helpful to others.

The Basic Points

1.  When you evaluate possible marketing strategies, ask yourself how you can use them to bring benefit to others. 

2.  Know that when you are ambivalent about ‘leaning into’ your marketing, it is almost always because you are *not* viewing it as serving the world.

3.  Know that the paradox is true—the more you give away, the more that will come back to you.

The contrast with TracFone was never so sharp as when I called Kohler for a problem with our kitchen faucet. The button needed to switch between regular and spray broke a few days ago. I really didn’t want to call, because the faucet is two years old, and their warranty runs for one year. I was convinced it was going to cost me a considerable amount to replace the hand sprayer.

But…

1) They answered right away.
2) They were able to identify the exact faucet.
3) They are sending the replacement button immediately.
4) They are sending a brand new spray handle once it is available; on backorder.

Essentially, they made a corporate decision to take care of this problem and DELIGHT their customers who had already experienced a problem with this unit by taking good care of them. That is the way to earn loyalty. If they had chosen short term profits, they would have charged me (or tried to), and our opinion of Kohler quality would have suffered. Now we’d look at Kohler first. That is what a brand is supposed to mean.

Rick Ellis whose company pmachine publishes Expression Engine (the weblog/CMS software which runs this site) writes:

A common decision faced by small companies like mine is whether to seek outside funding to help growth.  Venture Capital firms and Angel Investors are beginning to look at software and technology companies again after the bubble burst a couple years ago so it’s tempting to pursue these deals.  I was reminded of this yesterday in an email exchange with a friend of mine in which he asked why, in light of a certain competitor with a VC deal, aren’t we more aggressively pursuing funding?  “Wouldn’t you love to have a big staff of programmers doing your bidding?” he asked.  “Well sure”, I answered, “if it were only that simple.”.  It’s not.

The cold reality is that at least 70% of funded ventures fail.  When you scale up your expenses hiring staff, leasing office space, buying infrastructure, and paying for advertising – without the revenue to support it – the likelihood of your long terms success decreases drastically.  Most ventures never recover from the high cash-flow burn rate. 

Yet VCs need a high level of risk to make the investment worth it.  At least 3 out of 10 companies will fail so they rely one or two very big hits to pay for all the other speculation.  In business, you generally don’t hit a big home run being conservative. 

On the plus side for angel or VC investors, if you get the right one they can provide perspective and experience as well as depper pockets than other partners may have. In one company I am familiar with, quarterly board meetings that include outside investors do provide a focused attention to our finances, budget, sales projections, etc. They also provide a time when we are, to an extent, “selling” the vision AND the detailed execution of the company to outsiders.

I attended a breakfast meeting with Andrew Sherman, a lawyer with McDermott, Will & Emery [ http://www.mwe.com ] in Washington, DC. He is also an adjunct professor at Univ of Maryland. There is a strategic pyramid for capital formation that runs from your own money/resources at the base (the bootstrap mode) to money from family, friends, and key employees, SBA loans and small biz commercial lending, then Angels. Venture Capital is higher up the pyramid. Indeed, it doesn’t make sense to consider VC unless your capital needs are such that it cannot be bootstrapped, or borrowed. Why give up the control?

Andrew also recommended the book Every Business Needs an Angel by Cal Simmons and John May. The key here is that if financial projections show that the company will need capital to grow, an angel investor who knows the industry, may be retired but also interested in a “fun” project can be the right and best next investor up the pyramid. Choose the right one and if, just if, your business evolves to be the type that may need additional investors through a private placement or VC, and leading to an IPO if that is the path, you will have broadened the company’s expertise in the key area of capital formation.

To improve everything from fuel economy to performance, automotive researchers are turning to “mechatronics,” the integration of familiar mechanical systems with new electronic components and intelligent-software control. Take brakes. In the next five to 10 years, electromechanical actuators will replace hydraulic cylinders; wires will replace brake fluid lines; and software will mediate between the driver’s foot and the action that slows the car. And because lives will depend on such mechatronic systems, Rolf Isermann, an engineer at Darmstadt University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany, is using software that can identify and correct for flaws in real time to make sure the technology functions impeccably. “There is a German word for it: gründlich,” he says. “It means you do it really right.”

[Source unknown] … as a much smaller institution such practices were either legitimate or relatively harmless for the size of the company. Some of those habits become vices, however, as the company scales larger and larger. One such iniquity is a process dubbed “schedule chicken.”

Like many of my time, my first exposure to the game of chicken was viewing the classic scene from Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause. In that scene, Judy (Natalie Wood) and Jim (James Dean) were reaching achingly for each other’s outstretched hands while their tears dropped over the Malibu cliffs into the dark abyss below-and onto her (now permanently ex-) boyfriend Buzz (Corey Allen) and his Chevy. You see, Jim and Buzz were matched up to race their hot-rods over the fateful cliff and were supposed to jump out just in the last instant before their cars went over the edge. The first one to jump out of the car would be labeled a “chicken,” while the one closest to the edge would win bragging and (implicitly, anyway) Judy plucking rights. Jim jumped out okay, but the strap from Buzz’s leather jacket caught in the door handle, and he ended up in the third category of outcome: He missed the code complete date, he slipped the ship, tanked the target date-basically, Buzz bogeyed the bug bounce.

The software project equivalence happens when two or more areas of a product claim they can deliver their features at a ridiculously early date because each assumes the other feature area team is lying even worse about how long it will take them to deliver their features. This charade marches forward past one psychedelic checkpoint after another until just before the goods are actually due. A more seasoned team lead will delay copping to what is painfully obvious for as long as humanly possible, hoping someone else will break first and jump out of their car. The ceremony where the team lead has to admit the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes results in a tribal ritual that rivals Inca sacrifices, except that the virgin probably felt better about her fate. It is very difficult for the offending feature team to recover from being the furthest out on the schedule-because now that the truth is known, all everyone else has to do to look good is to finish just before that late team. Even if the schedule chickens end up beating the deadline, it is nearly impossible for the people on that team to beat the stigma of being unable to stay on a schedule.

Steve Chapman, Washington Times

    In May 1978, four men were arrested by Chicago police for murdering a suburban man and raping and murdering his fiancee. All the suspects claimed they were innocent, but there was no real doubt about their guilt: Three of them, after all, had failed a polygraph exam.

    Eventually, the Ford Heights Four, as they became known, were convicted for these brutal slayings, and two of the defendants were sentenced to death. But in 1996, DNA evidence exonerated all four. They had spent 18 years behind bars, partly because the lie detector lied.

    A report issued last week by the National Academy of Sciences recommended that the federal government stop using polygraphs to screen for security risks. Why? Because, in the words of the study, these devices are “intrinsically susceptible to producing erroneous results.” That’s academese for “I wouldn’t trust one as far as I could throw it.”

    The Energy Department adopted polygraph screening of employees in response to the case of Wen Ho Lee, a scientist accused of spying for China but convicted of only a minor security violation. DOE now tests about 2,000 people a year. But George Mason University systems engineering professor Kathryn Laskey, a member of the NAS committee, noted, “No spy has ever been caught using the polygraph.”

    There are particular dangers in subjecting lots of people to polygraphs in the effort to find a few wrongdoers, because false positives will greatly outnumber “true” positives. Some employees who have done nothing wrong will nonetheless have physiological reactions that look suspicious. Some accomplished liars will be able to fool the machine.

    To nab 8 out of every 10 real spies, the NAS report found, the device would probably have to erroneously implicate nearly 1,600 people. If it were set to minimize false positives, 80 percent of the real spies would slip past. But even then, 20 innocent people would be flagged for every guilty one.

    The same fallibility that renders these machines unusable for employee monitoring makes them dangerous for criminal investigations as well. Police and prosecutors regard polygraph results as the closest thing to a dead-bang certainty. But that faith lacks any foundation. “Almost a century of research in scientific psychology and physiology provides little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy,” concluded the panel.

    And there is no reason to think better technology will help. People simply don’t respond in a clear and predictable way to questions about what they may have done wrong. The “inherent ambiguity of the physiological measures used in the polygraph suggest that further investments in improving polygraph technique and interpretation will bring only modest improvements in accuracy,” said the report. Polygraphs are a crude instrument that can’t be refined.

    The consequences of a misleading polygraph exam are bad enough in the employment arena, where someone can lose a job or not be hired. But they’re much worse for criminal suspects, who can be locked away or even put to death because their pulse rate rose too much in a stressful situation.

    A polygraph result generally can’t be used as evidence in court. But some states allow the information if both the prosecution and the defense concur. So prosecutors may offer suspects the opportunity to clear themselves. Innocent suspects sometimes feel they have nothing to lose and much to gain from going along — only to fail the test.

    A couple of weeks ago, one Jimmy Williams was officially cleared by an Ohio court after spending 10 years in prison for the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl. In fact, the rape never happened, but the Akron man nonetheless managed to fail a polygraph exam. Because his lawyer had agreed in advance to admit the results, the jury was told the lie detector had implicated him.

    Other defendants have been victimized not only by the polygraph itself but by its aura of infallibility. Gary Gauger was sentenced to death for the murder of his parents on their McHenry County, Ill., farm but was eventually exonerated. He took a polygraph during his interrogation, and the results were inconclusive. But the police told him he had failed it.

    He was so rattled by the news that the cops were able to get him to speculate aloud how he might have killed his parents. Those statements were then used to convict him of a crime he never committed.

    Our medieval forebears had their own lie detector test: Suspected witches were dunked in water, on the theory that the guilty would float and the innocent would sink. Polygraphs aren’t quite as preposterous, but they’re bad enough.

Money Matters / Joseph Anthony [ http://www.bcentral.com/articles/anthony/187.asp?cobrand=msn&LID=3800 ]

It takes an entrepreneurial fire in your belly to start a business — and make it succeed — and not everyone has it. 

How do you know if you have what it takes to start a business? There’s really no way to know for sure. But I do find things in common among the emotional and family fabric of people ready to consider an entrepreneurial venture.

You don’t have to fit all seven of these categories to be a good candidate for entrepreneurship. But it probably wouldn’t hurt. In general, the more you have in common with these characteristics, the closer you probably are to being ready to try going out on your own.

1. You come from a line of people who couldn’t work for someone else. I don’t mean that in a negative way. People who are successful at establishing their own business tend to have had parents who worked for themselves. It’s usually easier to get a job with a company than to start your own business; people who strike out on their own often have the direct example of a parent to look to.

2. You’re a lousy employee. No need to sugar-coat this one. People who start their own businesses tend to have been fired from or quit more than one job. I’m not saying you were laid off for lack of work or transitioned from one job to a better-paying one — you were cut loose, or you quit before they could fire you. Think of it as the marketplace telling you that the only person who can effectively motivate and manage you is yourself.

3. You see more than one definition of “job security.” I’m truly envious of the few people I know who’ve stayed with one employer for 25 or 30 years. They look incredibly secure. But how many people do you know who are able to stay with one company for that long? In a rapidly changing economy, job security can be frighteningly fleeting.

Here’s how one self-employed person I know puts it: “If I work for someone and my boss screws up, or decides he doesn’t like me, or runs the company into the ground or any number of other things, then I’m out of a job. My security is tied to that one guy, that one company. But if a client decides they don’t like me, or they go out of business or whatever, I’ve still got the security of all the other customers I have.”

Or, to paraphrase one business observer (I think it was Dilbert), “It’s way better to have 100 idiot clients than to have one idiot boss.”

4. You’ve gone as far as you can go, or you’re not going anywhere at all. Sometimes the motivation to start a new venture comes from having reached the top of the pile where you are, looking around, and saying, “What’s next?” Early success can be wonderful, but early retirement can sometimes drive energetic and motivated people totally batty.

On the other hand, the drive to build something new can also come from deciding that you’re stuck in the middle instead of at the top. Fear of stagnation can be a powerful motivator, especially if you have an idea for something that could be at least more interesting and potentially more lucrative.

Speaking of which . . .

5. You’ve done the market research already. Don’t even talk to me about your great business idea if you haven’t put the time into figuring out if there’s a market for your product or service. As the people behind any number of failed Internet ventures will tell you, “cool” doesn’t necessarily translate into “profitable.” Don’t bother building it if you haven’t figured out whether there’s a good chance the customers will come. (For market research tips and online tools, check out bCentral’s demographics section.)

6. You’ve got the support of your family. Starting a business is stressful under the best of circumstances. Trying to do it without the support of your spouse or other significant family members or friends would probably be unbearable.

7. You know you cannot do it alone. You might excel at promoting a business. Maybe you love running the financial end of the enterprise. You could be someone who starts a business because you have unique creative or technical know-how to create a product.

Any of the above is possible, but it’s unlikely that you are going to excel at all of these tasks — or at all of the tasks involved in running any business. Forget all that “lone wolf” stuff. No matter how “go-it-alone” your philosophy is, you’re going to need some help sometime.

The willingness to get that help — having employees, partners or consultants for those areas in which you are not an expert — is one indicator of likely future success. As development consultant Ernesto Sirolli writes in “Ripples From The Zambezi,” “No successful entrepreneur has ever succeeded alone. . . . The person who is most capable of enlisting the support of others is the most likely to succeed.”

Karl Zinsmeister, editor in chief of The American Enterprise magazine, imagines an oh-so-green environmentalist enjoying the most politically correct product on the planet—Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Made in a factory that depends on electricity-guzzling refrigeration, a gallon of ice cream requires four gallons of milk. While making that much milk, a cow produces eight gallons of manure, and flatulence with another eight gallons of methane, a potent “greenhouse” gas. And the cow consumes lots of water plus three pounds of grain and hay, which is produced with tractor fuel, chemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides, and is transported with truck or train fuel:

“So every time he digs into his Cherry Garcia, the conscientious environmentalist should visualize (in addition to world peace) a pile of grain, water, farm chemicals, and energy inputs much bigger than his ice cream bowl on one side of the table, and, on the other side of the table, a mound of manure eight times the size of his bowl, plus a balloon of methane that would barely fit under the dining room table.”

Cherry Garcia. It’s a choice. Bon appetit.

Don Marquis. “When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: ‘Whose?’”

I’ve been thinking about salaries and wealth quite a bit recently. There is something galling about seeing executive compensation at times exceed millions of dollars a year when the company is going bankrupt, or seeing how some executives have been loaned tens of millions of dollars, or in the case of Bernie Ebbers of MCI Worldcom, $366 million, from funds that should go towards the business. Why would anyone want to invest in a company whose board of directors is so callous to its fiduciary responsibilities.

Yet, I’m also a conservative and a capitalist. I love to see people become millionaires through the application of their creative minds, their ability to lead a team, their determination and drive.

And I am sensitive to the fact that it often takes specialized leadership skills and courage to lead in the face of impossible odds. How much do you pay someone willing and able to turn a company around? I don’t know, but I do believe that it is best when done with rewards for measurable performance, ideally publicly disclosed for a public company. Instead, we often see huge bonuses paid when the company has done worse that it had before. In addition to more transparent accounting procedures, as an investor I’d like to see more transparency in the setting of executive compensation.

The Art of Turboing at http://www.macwhiz.com/articles/art-of-turboing.html: I’ve never called it “turboing” before, yet Rob Levandowski lists approaches for dealing with technical and customer support that do work.

Recently, I had a situation with First USA’s valuemiles program. I used miles to order a Toshiba 27” TV for my son’s birthday. After ordering it on the web, the confirmation email said “6-8 weeks for delivery.” Jeesh, we could have built it from spare parts in less time. But, okay, we’d survive. It would arrive within a week or so of my son’s birthday.

It didn’t.

Their customer service was a nightmare. Outwardly helpful people with no information. Their second tier support had no authority to do anything. There was one woman, “Jen,” who was never available. I was told by three people that they would have her call. No call. I finally was given her voice mail, where I explained the urgency. One week, no call. So, I spent time working nicely and cooperatively through customer service depts. Finally, someone gave me the switchboard, and the switchboard was great and took 10 minutes to finally connect me with the Office of the President. I followed the processes described and finally did get the to “upgrade” the TV to a Sony and promise it to me within 10 days. God knows whether it will indeed arrive. I have zero faith that if I had not turboed that I’d have any chance whatsoever of getting anything for my points.