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6 Reasons Why You Need To Hire A Business Coach

If you’re feeling burned out or stuck with your work in terms of career advancement, or maybe your business is stuck somewhere and don’t know how to improve your journey, hiring a business coach can help you gain traction and have a better understanding of yourself.

By running your business, problem-solving is part of the traits and things that you do on a daily basis. You are faced with numerous problems that you have to solve to ensure that your business gets better and performs better. Take note though, that even if you’re doing this on a regular basis means that you don’t need a bit of advice. In fact, it pays to have a bit of help from someone to give you a new approach, a new perspective and a fresh set of ideas.

This is where a business coach enters the scene. They don’t just coach you related to business aspects, but they also help you become the best version of yourself to bring out the best version of your business as well.

Whether you’re planning on expanding your business, improving some of your recruitment processes, or simply wanted to improve the long-term goals and plans of your business, hiring a coach plays a crucial role. They are the ones who specialize in these areas of expertise and can genuinely and significantly help you grow your business. While we know that all of these are overwhelming, here are some of the benefits that you can expect when hiring one. Take these points to help you better understand whether a business coach is worth investing your money and time as well.

1. They Are Active Listeners

This is one of the most notable benefits of hiring a business coach. They are active listeners – they show that they are interested in whatever you’re about to say and they would also offer feedback in return. They pay attention to whatever you’re saying, whether these are problems in your HR department or some walls that you’ve hit while you’re running your business. Business coaches have been trained to actively listen and helpfully and positively respond to your concerns.

2. They Are Objective

Unlike your family and friends, who are most often involved in your life, a coach isn’t. They have a way of seeing things that you or a loved one may see differently. Their objectivity is one of the assets of a business coach and this is where you can get honest suggestions and feedback from them.

Sometimes it can be tempting to work with a family friend or relative who is a business coach, but this isn’t always a great idea. Abhiraj Singh has had experience with this before and recommends to “find a business coach whom you have no personal connection with. Using a family member or friend as a business coach will make it difficult to separate business from personal relationships, and can lead to arguments and tension.”

3. You’ll Learn Lessons

Depending on your struggles and goals, your business coach may also assign some “tasks” or homework to you. These tasks let you look at your life and business differently. Some will ask you to write these in a journal, some may require you to list down your goals, network with other people, interview other people, or even ask you to read more and research more about a certain topic. It’s not a one size fits all so what your tasks will depend on your situation. As you go along the way, you’ll learn a thing or two (or even more) from these tasks which will help you grow as a business owner. Take note though that when you’re given a task, you need to take time to do it and reflect on it as this is a crucial step in helping your business grow.

A business coach is there to assist you, but they simply can’t do it if you don’t cooperate with them and do what they’re asking of you. E-Commerce business owner Gurkan Gurgur recommends that “when you first meet with your business coach, identify what kind of work they will require from you and how much time it should take. Schedule an appropriate amount of time each week to work on implementing the coaches recommendations without being tempted to do other activities.”

4. They Will Guide You

Since you’re at the top of your business, guidance is often something that we don’t get as business owners, which is why we need someone like a business coach to guide us through the process. When working with a coach, it is important that you learn to trust their judgment and observations and follow their suggestions. Most often than not, the situations we’re in may appear blurry for us, clouding our judgment and decision-making process. This is where a business coach can help you as they usually see things that we don’t as a business owner.

5. They Are Knowledgeable

One of the things that you’re paying for when hiring a business coach is their knowledge and expertise in the field. They are up to date on the latest trends, research, and strategies that work in the field. You’re paying to access that knowledge base through your coach, and they will help you apply what they know to your business.

They can also tell you where to focus your energy. Business owner Mark Douglas says it’s essential to prioritise income-producing activities. “I introduce and focus on the services that produce a greater profit for my business. As a result, we get the cash flow required to continue offering the services that we loved but weren’t necessarily making me the most money.”.

6. They Provide Helpful Insights

A business coach can provide helpful insights as a result of actively listening and observing your activities and methods at work. These insights may also include your behavior, and others as well, which will help you carry on with your business process. Most often than not, they can help you take down that brick wall that’s stopping you from growing as a business. Even after your coaching relationship ends, they are the ones that you can always carry with you and even work with in the future.

We don’t consider business coaching as a therapeutic process, but rather a professional journey that helps you unlock your potential as a business owner by giving you a better self-understanding and letting you perform actions based on the results. With the right business coach, you’ll find yourself doing better as a business owner, where you see your business grow as its cores are strengthened and as your creativity keeps flowing.

As a matter of fact, hiring a business coach is often-times referred to as a life-changing moment in your business.

Paul Duncan

Marketing and Lead Generation Strategist

Author of “Dominate Your Market “

P: 0433440881

E: Paul@paulduncan.com.au

www.paulduncan.com.au   

Kick Start Your Marketing

Today I’d like to teach you about the three most important start up marketing tools you need to get and keep new customers.

1. In person: It’s essential you meet with customers/clients in person whenever possible. This shows you respect them and take the time to work with your clients to give personal attention to each of them.
2. Follow up letter: Always take a moment to send a follow up letter about what you talked about, new agreements or partnerships made and to thank them for taking the time to meet with you. Likewise, you should always send thank you letters or small gifts to partners you find success with.
3. Phone call: Use a telephone call to follow up with them to talk again about the matters you talked about in your meeting and offer any assistance you can to help their business run smoothly and more successfully.

None of these will work if you don’t have a quality product/service to back you up!

Here are the key steps for putting together your start-up marketing tools:

1. Research potential customers, buyers, competitors and their preferred methods of distribution.
2. Talk to potential customers. Take a hard look at your product from a customer’s perspective and see what it needs to be successful.
3. Follow up with your 3-step process from above.
4. Develop systems for contact follow through, quality control standards and customer service.
5. Develop post-sale follow up system to keep lines of communication open is customers and build on your current relationship which increases future purchases.

“Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs” Peter Drucker, management consultant

Here’s another one I love from an icon:

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.” Henry Ford, Founder of Ford Motor Company

This lesson has offered you the tools to put together a start-up marketing plan that can be used over and over again to help your customer base and business grow in a manageable way. The tools offered in our FREE test drive offer these very same things.

Stop Wasting Your Resources!

Today you’re going to learn how to find a target market of potential customers so you aren’t wasting precious resources on blitz marketing. So, the two questions you have to ask yourself are:

• What do people really want to buy from me?
• What related products are they already buying?

Once you figure this out you will know who is more predisposed to purchase your products/services. Then, you find other businesses with the same customer base who you can customer share with. Come up with an incentive and great arrangement to encourage both of your customer bases to shop at both of your stores.

The basic concept is this:

You want to find existing businesses who have the customer profile that you are looking for to market your products/services to.

Then strike up a relationship with those business owners to work out an incentive for customers to purchase from both businesses.

As a result, you have an audience to market to and they generate an added value from their current base.

So, how do you figure this out? There is a great formula from Jay Abraham you can follow with great success.

LV = (P x F) x N – MC

Here’s what it all means:

• LV is the life time value of a customer
• P is the average profit margin from each sale
• F is the number of times a customer buys each year
• N is the number of years customers stay with you
• MC is the marketing cost per customer (total costs/number of customers)

Once you know how much you need to spend to attract a new customer, you will know how much of an incentive you can offer to a business to help attract new customers.

So, here’s your step-by-step process:

1. Find companies who already have the customer base you are looking for.
2. Negotiate an incentive for them to share that customer base with you.
3. Focus your marketing resources to this group of predisposed customers.

If you need help working through this process, check out our FREE test drive for the most comprehensive system of marketing tools and resources.

Educate Your Customers

Educate them about what, you may be thinking. Well, consider this, many businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, but you NEED to spend a good chunk of your time retaining current and former customers. These are people you already know to be a good sales potential…they’ve already bought from you!

Take the time to market and sell new products to your old customers and less time trying to sell old products to new customers and you will see a drastic change in your sales, customer quality and branding position.

Here are a couple of key elements to use to retain your current customers:

1. Stay in contact: This means by phone, email, e-newsletter, in person-by pigeon if you have too!
2. Post-Purchase Assurance: This means you need to follow up with customers. Your customers need to feel like they are being supported for their purchase and with the item they purchased. How many times have you purchased a product, then felt completely abandoned? Something as simple as a Thank You note with your contact or customer service information can go along way in retaining a great customer.
3. Deals & Guarantees: Always offer your current customers the best deals and guarantees you have. Show them you appreciate their business or even come up with a club specifically to reward loyal customers. You can also do this with a preferred pricing option.
4. Integrity: Using good business practices and simply upholding integrity, dignity and honesty go along way with customers. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of swindling and crap out there and the safer and more confident you make your customers feel, the more they will trust you and that makes for an amazingly supportive and loyal customer.

There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business:

• Quality product/service
• Offering useful products/services that solve a problem for or enhance the life of a customer
• Offer subjects your customers find interesting

Use this approach of educating your customers and offering them real information and insight and you will be rewarded with loyalty and success.

Stop wasting all your time on new prospects while your current customers fall by the wayside!

As Jay Abraham says, “Your best prospects are your existing customers. If you’ve been putting all your marketing efforts into acquiring new customers, stop and diverts some of your resources into reselling, upselling, cross-selling to those same customers. In every ways possible – through package inserts, regular mailings, special offers – stay in touch with those customers and get them used to buying from you.”

So, there it is! Remember, our FREE test drive can help you put together the resources and tools to do exactly that. We can help you educate your customers and you can watch the benefits pay offer many-fold.

Lessons I Learned from Paris Hilton

Today we’ll talk about shameless self-promotion. That’s right, I said it! Shameless! After all, we are learning from Paris Hilton here.

It’s all about self-promotion! Self-promotion comes in many forms and you can use different tactics to get your name out there. Look at politicians! Talk about self-promotion and in some not so discreet ways, at that. But, seriously, consider some of the major superstars we all know. Madonna, Donald Trump, Howard Stern and Bill Clinton, just to name a few.

We all self promote. Did you raise your hand in class to show the teacher you knew the answer? Of course! That’s self-promotion. This is the kind of self-promotion we are talking about. With dignity, class and the knowledge to back it up. If you self-promote only to prove you don’t really know what you’re talking about, you’re going to lose business.

Natural self-promoters are the former and I want to tell you about the three major traits they have and use to build themselves and their businesses.

1. The first is position. You need to position yourself around people who can make a difference in your life. You need to do this frequently. You need to wake up every morning and ask yourself “Who can I meet today who will make a difference in my success?” In fact, go a step further, write it in big, bold letters and tape it on your bathroom mirror.

Also consider:

Who can help me meet my goals?

Is it a prospective customer/client? A colleague with contacts? An association with key members who may become prospects?

Don’t settle into interacting with the people who are the easiest to access. You need to reach outside your comfort zone and there you will find a wealth of new connections that will bring you great success.

2. Now, let’s talk about Style. No, this doesn’t mean you need an Armani suit to bring in more business (though, let’s be honest-it wouldn’t hurt) J What this really means is how are you different from your competitors and others in your industry. What makes you memorable with customers?

If you are meeting a lot of people and they don’t remember you once you leave the room, you have a serious problem! This means you have an opportunity to present yourself in a more memorable way.

There are lots of little subtle changes you can make. Reassess your:

• Business cards
• Company message
• Your picture
• Your wording

Maybe even, your hairstyle (of course, now we’re back to the expensive suit, but it really works!)

You get the idea. There are lots of little ways you can work on making your image and business more successful. Also, consider how you sound on the phone and how you greet people at meetings or other events. Think about your 30-sec elevator speech.

3. The third trait of natural promoters is repetition. You can’t say it once and leave it at that. Successful self-promoters say it as many times as they need until they get a response. Would you remember a commercial for Coca-Cola if you only saw it once, no! You see it over and over and eventually you head out to the store.

You, also, have to make multiple impressions on those you are networking with in order to build brand awareness. Repetition is in direct connection with positioning. Once you find people to network with, reach out and find hundreds more who can help in your success as well.