5 Steps to Build the Best Service Based Business – Ever!

Quick Summary

I wanted to provide a quick summary at the beginning of this blog post so that you can decide if this article is for you or not.

This is for 3 kinds of entrepreneurs:

  • For people who run a coaching, consultancy or service based business
  • For people who want to convert more leads
  • For people who are committed to the growth of your business on an ongoing basis.


And the content in this article is set out i
n this order…

1. Get into the right mindset.  This is something that holds a lot of people back and is the most important thing to address first.

2. Decide on your (niche) audience.  Get higher conversions by getting your offer in front of the right people.

3. Create your irresistible offer.  By packaging your offer in the right way, will get more people to buy it.

4. Automate the process … how to create a system on autopilot.

5. Scale to sell to more people. Get more eyes on your message with paid ads.

Do you want the get this system implemented into your business?

Yes?  Great. Let go straight for the good stuff!

Processes win the day –every day.

These steps each play an important part in growing and scaling your business, and I’m going to go in to detail with each of these topics.

Step by step.

It’s the process I use personally with my clients to get them out of boom or bust cycles, or feast or famine as its often called –  into having consistent, predictable higher converting revenue.

After you’ve finished reading this article, my hope is that you take action.  And if you take action and replicate this process for your own business then you will see success.

Sounds good?

Let’s go…

Step 1. Upgrading Your Mindset is Critical.

Let me start by saying I’m no psychologist!  But I know what I see, and I know because I had to work on this myself… the number one biggest thing holding back business owners from being successful?

Your own thoughts, fears and beliefs.

Simple, but true.

Can you change your mindset? Absolutely yes.   Mindsets are just beliefs, they are powerful beliefs, but they’re just something in your mind, and you can CHANGE your mind.

Sounds easy doesn’t it.  But life is never that easy.

Why am I talking about this now?  In business there’s one enemy you will come up against time and time again. This enemy will make you question yourself and doubt every move you make. It feeds resistance and constantly breathes down your neck. That enemy is you.

Our thoughts and fears hold us back a lot.  But we have to work through them and overcome them to get moving because change is happening all around us, all the time.

Especially in business as nothing stands still in business, least of all technology.  Think about it.  Just 20 years ago the internet had only been around for a few years… we had no social media at all, and people believed the internet wouldn’t last, it was just a fleeting phase!

Hmm, not quite how life has turned out 20 years later – right?

Do you know the difference between the successful business – and the business that has plateaued?

Education!  And I don’t mean a university degree, ‘A’ Levels or any such thing.

I mean the internet has now allowed us all access to information we never could have dreamed of.  The amount of FREE information available to us all now is unprecedented.

But the problem is that you’ve been stuck “in” your business and not given yourself the time to look to see what’s new and what’s possible.

This is the magic key.

Not standing still and evolving is all about educating yourself on a constant basis.  Educating yourself in every aspect of business can help you keep on top of the decision making process.

I read books too – this has given me the insights I needed to not just influence me, but to give me the knowledge I needed to help my clients.

Here’s a few I recommend to help get you started:

Step 2. Audience – be clear on who your ideal customer is.

Before you create your offer, you must first understand who your ideal customers are.

This bit is hard, it’s not easy – and to get the best results, I suggest you survey your existing customers.

And remember that the more you understand this, the easier it will be to get your messaging right. OK? Right, let’s dive in.

Here’s two areas to look at:

AVATAR – Who is your ideal customer?  How do you figure this out?

MESSAGE – What message do I need to put in front of them to get them to buy from me?

AVATAR, or your ideal customer, or your best prospect – the people you most enjoy working with.

I see people either guessing this or just not really understanding who their ideal client should be.  It’s quite tough to figure this out – takes time.

It is true what they say – the riches are in the niches.  (If you don’t know who your niche is, google “list of niche markets” to help you).

And you can’t create the message without knowing WHO you’re writing the message to (or for), right?  The two go hand in hand.

Let’s look at WHO your audience is?  To find this out the best way is to ask them questions. I did this by going back to my existing customers. It was quite an eye opener for me.  This is the kind of information you need to find out…

  • What are their goals?
  • What are their challenges and pain points?
  • What are their sources of information?

And also, what objections would they have in the purchase process?  By being able to overcome this, you will already have the advantage.

Goals are important.  How can you help them if you don’t know what their goal is?

But most importantly you must understand their pain points. What is their biggest pain point that you can help them with – and lead with your solution to their pain in your marketing.

Now you have a clear idea of who you’re targeting, do you want to write a compelling message to capture their attention?

Yes? Great.

Let’s look at your message.  And this goes back to understanding how sophisticated your market is?

Your message is what will captivate them, so the clearer you are the better.

How do you do this?

Think about how much they know about you and your services?  They will fall into 1 of 5 categories (according to Eugene Schwartz):

Most Aware

These people are probably already on your mailing list, they’re hyper aware and probably your best prospects…

Solution Aware

Looking for the solution you are offering.  Have a great level of awareness. Typically lots of places to target, they’ll attend your events, exhibitions etc.  Best way to scale your business.  These people will search Google for you.

Problem Aware

They understand they are in pain, that they have a problem and so they search for symptoms to their problem because they don’t know you are the solution.  You have to talk to their problem to get their attention.

Desire Aware

These people have a problem, but it’s not bad enough to cause them pain. They don’t have that need or want yet. (… until they realise a friend of theirs earns £100K doing XYZ…) then they’ll transition to Level 3.   Speak to what they desire/feel.  This can be very hard to do.

Completely Unaware

They have no desire yet, but are demographically a good fit.  They don’t have a desire or a problem in their eyes.   These are the hardest to target purely because they’re not listening.

—-

Don’t make the mistake and think that everyone is your market.  They’re not. And also by targeting the completely unaware and desire aware will require a lot more work, based on the fact that you’ll need to do a LOT of educating first to bring them up to the Solution Aware point.

I recommend targeting the most aware and solution aware.  These people are looking for people just like you. They are looking solutions, so focus on this with your message.  If you start targeting people further down the awareness, they’ll need a lot more educating and it will take a lot longer.  Target people who are at the stage of their journey where you can most help them.

Next is about how to…

Step 3. Create a Compelling (Irresistible) Offer

I follow team at Digital Marketer, in particular Ryan Deiss.  I remember when I went to the Traffic and Conversion conference in San Diego in 2017, Ryan said then (and many times since…) “Do you have a good offer –  if you don’t then it won’t matter how good your marketing is, your funnel will fail.

You can have the best marketing funnel in the world, but if your offer is not what the market wants… then it just won’t sell.

It’s all about what the market wants. (Remember this, it’s very important).   See this example to access HQ at Digital Marketer

See the different options they have to attract their ideal customer?

Here’s how I approach figuring out how to create your “irresistible offer”.

  • Document your services, and the outcome you offer to your clients.
  • Work out how many hours it takes to deliver the service, and over what period of time. (Try to get this to be between 4-8 weeks).
  • Research your pricing – test it on a small number of prospects to see if it resonates.
  • Consider how you will deliver these services – online or in-person?

Try to make sure you’ve tested this offer before to clients so that you know it’s worked and you have feedback.

Now you have your Core offer – not yet irresistible… I’ll come on to that later – but first you must now think about what happens next.

By next – I mean once you have provided this valuable service to your clients, they might want more from you – how do you plan to deliver that?

In other words – what is your ancillary offer?

It’s expensive to gain a lead from Facebook or Google (used to be $10-$20 per lead but now can be as much as $180 per conversion).

Your goal should be to maximise getting new clients on the front end, and creating additional services and upsells on the backend to maximise your return on lead generation.

Now create follow on services.

  • What’s the next logical step a client will take next?
  • How can you help them make that next move?

Now create additional services, using the same process 1-4 above to create your ancillary service.

So we have:

  • Core offer
  • Ancillary offer.

Next we need to make these irresistible.

You’ve already done most of the legwork here. We just need to modify it slightly to make it easy for the customer to buy:

Let’s take an example:

PRODUCT:    Coaching Programme to Realise Your Full Potential

COST:   £997

Now you need to think about payment terms. What payment terms will you accept for this offer?

PRODUCT:    Coaching Programme to Realise Your Full Potential

COST:   £997

PAYMENT TERMS:  Three monthly payments of £350

This can be a very effective technique, especially for higher priced items.

You can also add in other payment terms, such as annual vs monthly plans. This can work well if you wanted to incorporate your ancillary programme within the main price of your core service.  You could discount this for people who pay upfront for the whole year.

The next step would be to add in a discount:

PRODUCT:    Coaching Programme to Realise Your Full Potential

COST:   £997

PAYMENT TERMS:  Three monthly payments of £350

DISCOUNT:  On sale for £797

Discounts are a classic, time-tested way to get more people to take your offer.

The downside is that of course, this can eat into your profit margin, but you can make up for this by increasing sales.

You might want to think about offering a 25% discount at certain times of the year.

NOTE: Before you start selling to your audience, you need to know who your ideal customer is – in other words your avatar… but more on this later.

Three more options you could add to make your offer even more irresistible would be:

BONUS:  If they buy now they’ll get extra value with add ons
BUNDLE:  You could add further services you offer, and bundle them all at one price.

(RISK REVERSAL) –First trial session for FREE.

URGENCY: Price jumps back up after the initial Promotion period.

I know through working with many service based clients not to use ALL these options at one time.  Look at your core product and using your imagination look to see how you can convert it to become more irresistible using these methods.

I’d also suggest trialling it on existing clients too, to get their feedback.

I hope this has helped you create your offer!

Step 4. AUTOMATE

The next thing to address is getting your message and offer out there and deciding how to do it.  It’s about creating content that educates your audience in a way that will help build that relationship.

I’ve found webinars to be increasingly useful.  By doing them live first it’s a great way to get feedback from your audience first. When you know good what your audience wants and your webinar converts then you can start to automate it and make it evergreen.

I use Demio for webinars (there are many others).

But let’s not get confused here.  When I talk about automation, I’m talking about the process from when a prospect signs up for your webinar right through to the follow up.

This is not something that can or should be done manually because it’s far too time-consuming. This is where you need an ESP (email service provider) to manage this for you.

I use Infusionsoft (there are many others), but this is what it allows me to do:

  • Capture a prospect (contact) via landing page or website
  • Nurture that prospect until it takes action (that I want it to take)
  • Educate and sell to this prospect
  • Create order forms to make it easy for the prospect to buy
  • Understand the needs of the prospect by tagging them (segmentation)
  • Put the right content in front of the right prospects.
  • Retarget prospects

But back to the webinar…

Emails need to be sent strategically at certain times to remind the prospect to sign up and tune in to your webinar. This is what I send to my subscribers when they sign up.

Sometimes they forget, and sometimes life gets in the way so I recommend automating sending them a copy of the replay.  (Extra 24% sales are made from replays and follow up).

See my screen shot below…

This is how to send people down your webinar funnel, and automate your follow up.

See how you can tag people based on how much of the webinar they watched?

This means you can send the right information to the right people, to increase engagement and increase conversions.

Lessons I’ve learnt doing webinars… listen to your audience and your customers, respond to them and give them what they want.

A book that taught me a lot was Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson.

So now let me see where we are:

  • The right way of thinking..
  • An audience and a message..
  • An irresistible offer..
  • Automated marketing follow ups.

All that is left now is to …


Step 5. SCALE

Now you have your webinar at a point you know it will convert, the next stage is to start investing in paid ads with Facebook.

This can take a bit of time to figure out but you already know who your audience is, so you just need to follow these simple steps.

Set up a business facebook account, linked to your business page.

Then when choosing what type of campaign to create, choose Lead Generation, as that is the goal for your ad.

Then create an ad that is “like having a conversation” with your prospect.  By being chatty you’re more likely to get engagement, and even better ask a question.  Call out your prospect.

Then tell them in your ad

  • exactly what they’re going to get.
  • More details
  • How to Sign up.

And link your ad to your landing page.

There are many people who I learn from to get FB ads knowledge.  The one I found most useful was Molly Pittman from Digital Marketer (although she now runs her own consultancy) she had great training on how to create relevant FB Ads.

Here’s something to consider though.

If you are targeting people on FB who “don’t know you”, ie they’ve never heard of you before (FB call this a Cold Audience) then two things will happen:

  • It will cost more to get OPT-Ins and it will take longer
  • They’re less likely to show up to your webinar.

If, however, you create content that’s of value, ie blogs, videos, podcasts and so on, then you can retarget them, as they are now a warm audience.

You’ll get much better response from warm audiences.

Ralph Burns from Digital Marketer shares some great advice here

The goal is to create a relationship, and build trust with your audience.

Your Next Steps

My hope is you enjoyed this post, and maybe learned a few things.

That was my goal.  And if you’ve reached this far – thankyou.

Let me ask you something now.

Are you stuck at one of these stages?

Do you want to get off the hamster wheel and accelerate your business?

See you on the other side…

Alison