The one question I’m asked all the time now is the best way for a business to come out of lockdown in great financial shape. People are thinking marketing strategies, funnels, events, dollars.
*Cue that screeching halt noise like a record player arm being dragged across vinyl.*
My best advice isn’t about gearing up and making sweeping changes. It’s to put humanity ahead of profits.
To be generous.
Since I became a coach in 2003, my passion has been knowing how I empower me, what gets me lit up inside, and how to share it with people.
I learned really quickly the power of generosity. I give my best stuff away. I tell all our coaches to do it, to be generous with your IP. Give it away.
Then students think, “If I get all this for free now, what is it going to be like when I join you?” That model kicked in real early, by 2004. I could see too many professional service providers hanging on tightly to what they had, thinking, “But that’s my most valuable thing to market.”
It’s not. Your most valuable thing is your relationships.
I would rather tell people how to market through generosity than market through discounting.
Give stuff away, and they want to be part of that attitude. Students join us for the movement, they want to be part of something that is such an attractive and generous space.
It’s relationship based or value based marketing. What else is there?
You can keep giving little things away piecemeal but it’s not going to really serve you or the clients.
If you show people how to rock, they will rave about you. They’ll sit at dinner with friends and tell a story about you, and it’s either going to be a brag story or a sad story.
You want it to be a brag story, every day.
For The Coaching Institute, it can’t be about us during COVID-19. Early on in lockdown, we moved into importing hospital-grade sanitiser to provide to our community at cost. It was something that was within our skill base to do, and it also tapped into the mission of humanity before profits.
During my morning walks, I’ve been dropping it off in letterboxes around my neighbourhood. Every little bit helps, right?
As soon as lockdown started, we kicked off a global coaching initiative called ‘Coach Your Neighbour’ where anybody anywhere could get free life coaching.
And I immediately started giving away one of our most valuable programs, Empowering You, so people who were hurting could get instant insights.
We wanted to touch people’s lives in a positive way and because we made that first pivot, put ‘what can we do’ before the bottom line, we’re doing really well.
I appreciate there are businesses which are just getting through and others which gave been smashed, and generosity might seem the last thing on their mind.
But it’s what I know and what works for me. My attitude is we’re all going to get through this one way or another, and I want to look back knowing I made positive decisions and lived my values.
Women Love Tech would like to thank Sharon Pearson for her article.