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There are only a few free places left, and this offer is only made to you here and now. Book your call within the next hour if you don’t want to miss out!

Modern day sales and marketing gurus are advising coaches and mentors to go through a carefully thought-out marketing and sales process to sell their services. If you have attended a webinar or training to learn more about sales and marketing for coaches and mentors, you will likely recognise the above sentence as part of the process below:

• Advertise (paid or through social networking) with a freebee ‘lead magnet’ to solve a specific problem. This could be a book, a challenge, a webinar… whatever you prefer.
• Offer a bit of helpful information (but certainly not all of it) in your freebee to show off your skills and knowledge, whilst also making sure that your potential clients understand that
  a) they have a problem; and
  b) they can’t solve it by themselves with the solution you’ve just given away for free, so they will need more of your help resolving it
• At the end of the freebee, invite them to get on a “free discovery call” with you to help them even more.
• In the “free discovery call”, follow a carefully designed sales script to let your potential customer feel the pain of their problem, understand the relief you can offer, and turn your potential into a paying customer.

And don’t forget to add some “scarcity” in every step, for example, limited places or a limited period for discount, so that the perceived level of urgency will help your customers to take the lead magnet, book that call, and purchase your offer immediately.

The process above addresses a few of the marketing and sales basics that most of us will have heard of before. Customers need various points of contact before they start recognising a brand. Once they do, it’s important to build the “know, like and trust factor”, and a good way of doing that, is by showcasing what you have on offer. And finally, scarcity does make people more eager to buy.

And you know what? Given the number of coaches and mentors using this approach, we can only assume that this process is really working to draw paying customers to your business.

Yet, we urge you NOT to follow this process!

The process described above is basically one big lie. It’s designed for one purpose only; to acquire paying customers. How does this process really help those customers? Does the freebie offer a real, tangible, measurable result? Or is it just an appetizer for the paid real deal? Is the discovery call really focused on helping the customer? Or is the real focus on making a sale? And what’s going on with the scarcity? Would paying customers really not be welcome at any given time?

We’re not saying that you can’t follow a proven process like this, but we are asking you to always act with honesty and integrity. If you promise value, then deliver value. If you promise help, then provide help. And if you want to make a sale, then simply be clear about that intention as well. There is nothing wrong with selling your services, but there is an ethical way of doing it. From the “know, like and trust factor” trust is most important in our industry. Don’t ever underestimate that, or jeopardise it, in your efforts to make a sale.

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