Service-oriented Marketing

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.