Send your clone out to do your marketing!

The problem with selling a consultancy or training service is that you are selling something intangible. That requires a tremendous amount of trust and a financial leap of faith from a prospect. How do you encourage someone to make that leap of faith? To facilitate trust, five key thought processes need to be present in that prospect mind:

• a fear of failure

• a vision of success

• repeat exposure to your message

• a strong sense that you are offering something different (and better)

• an engaging experience

Even if you are a well-established consultant, trainer or educator those five rules apply. Prospects need repeated exposure to the impact of failing and to the solutions you offer. They need to know what sets you apart from the rest and it needs to be an engaging experience. This will establish those emotional touch points that play a pivotal role in the buying decision.

Face facts…

You could spend a lot of time - with all the risk associated with that - talking to prospects and nurturing them into making that leap of faith. But is that what you really want to do? For most consultants and trainers sales and marketing is a necessary evil.

What you need to do is clone yourself and send out the clones to do the marketing and sales for you! Even better, create a clone that will work 24/7 and never take a holiday. This is all about packaging your knowledge, skills, experience, style and personality into engaging content so you have something out there securing leads and building trust while you focus on being a brilliant consultant.

However, you are not going to differentiate yourself by doing the same blogs, PowerPoint slides and talking head videos as everyone else. You will not make any significant impact with the same clip art and stock images everyone else is using either. You need to whack them between the eyes with WOW FACTOR and the only way to do this is through effective visual communication. You need a:

• strong visual narrative

• unique visual brand.

Everything you do in visual communication needs to be instantly recognisable as YOU! The content needs to engage and inspire. People must be so impressed with what they’ve just learnt and experienced that the first thing that comes to mind is: “Where do I get more of this?” And with each piece of content they engage with they start to know and, trust you, giving them that feel-good factor necessary to make the sale a done deal.