Sell High Priced Programs blog

In order to create your own niche category, it is vital that you offer services that nobody else offers. The best way to make sure your services are unique is to create your own proprietary system.

Your proprietary system is the exact steps and processes you take clients through in order to solve a very specific and painful problem. This very specific and painful problem must be one that people will pay to have addressed. There are certain specific and painful problems which, while annoying, are not quite painful enough (yet) so that your clients’ can justify the investment in your high end programs and services. So you must be sure that you build your proprietary system around a problem that your clients would be willing to invest in finding a solution to.

Create More Value, Make More Money

When you build your proprietary system, your first step is to start by determining what it is you offer that nobody else can offer. We’ve touched on this idea before, but your greatest resource is your own self reflection, which is the outcome of your life experiences and what you learned from them. Chances are, you’ve had at least a few very specific and painful problems in your life that you would have paid money to have resolved or fixed. If you can recall one or more of these, you have a good starting point for identifying a problem that perhaps other people would pay to have solved for them too.

This is how you know your market will pay for your solution. Your next step is to define what your solution is. How did you solve the problem for yourself? What combination of thoughts and actions allowed you to ultimately overcome this problem?

Can you define a clear, step by step, pathway that you took to move from problem to solution? If so, I’d suggest diagramming or flowcharting this out for yourself. If we take an example of weight loss, let’s say that you ate a certain combination of foods, did a certain amount of exercise, and thought of your body and weight in a certain way. If you can pinpoint the specifics of what worked for you, you can build your proprietary system around it.

While it’s not a 100% requirement that you be a product of your own system, it’s excellent if you are. Not only will you be a living and breathing testimonial as to the proof of your system, you will naturally have a great deal of passion for sharing your story and educating your market. When proprietary system + perfect testimonial + passion meet, there is profitability just waiting to happen.

For the first time I really had a dream. It actually happened 8 years ago–the first time I took time to dream since I was a kid. (Isn’t that too bad! It’s terrible actually that I had lost my ability to imagine. The stats show that adults today lose the ability to increase their imagination by the age of 14!)

At that time I was dead broke as a young Vice Principal–I was the youngest one with our school board. In fact my wife, Fiona, had literally spent money that we didn’t have on another line of credit to send me to California to meet a friend for a week and determine if getting another degree (I was about to begin a PhD program) was really the answer to our financial dilemma.

Create More Value, Make More Money

It might not seem a lot to you, but excluding the normal debt that people have–car, house, education etc.–we were behind the proverbial eight ball by about $60,000. Our debt at that time was more than what I made as a Vice Principal…and we were sinking into the ‘Red Zone’ faster and faster.

This was definitely the wrong kind of ‘Speed To Market’ that I teach today to my business coaching clients.

On the video below I stand before this famous pier in California in honor of the dream I had right where I stand.

And today I visit here often–whenever I am in California–and have had my family here with me to celebrate the fact that I was able to leave my job as a former Vice Principal in record time six and a half years ago.

To help you understand what you need to know about creating and communicating your competitive advantage in an overcrowded market place, watch the video below.

I shot this live in front of this webcam this past week to help you with the following and before I shared this at a private networking event with Jeffrey Hayzlett (CEO Of Kodak), Tony Hsieh (who recently sold his company Zappos to Microsoft), Peter Guber (CEO of Madalay Entertainment) and about 200 other high level entrepreneurs :

–>3 Critical Principles when it comes to How To Create And Communicate Your Competitive Advantage In An Overcrowded Market Place.

To Accelerated Profits from your IP!

Glenn

P.S.

Live In Front Of This Live Cam–A CamCast!–You Will Recognized The Pier I Stand Before!

(And you will learn three critical principles to create and communicate your competitive advantage in an overcrowded market place.)

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One of the fundamental concepts that most business coaching experts miss is the concept of learning how to do business.

In fact MBA programs and other formalized ways of learning business totally miss this point.

You can’t ‘learn’ business.

This is the fundamental reason that so many people fail in business and fail as entrepreneurs.

So how do you actually ‘learn’ business?

The only way to ‘learn’ business is to ‘do’ business.

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The emphasis must be on the doing. As much as it is critical that you know how to translate your value into Intellectual Property so that you can create and sell the most expensive programs in your niche market, it is as equally important that you know how to implement at the same time.

If you examine the research of Edgar Dale (Just Google ‘Cone Of Learning’ and click on images) you will see that his research was cutting edge as being the first to reveal that no true learning happens by listening, watching or reading.

Real time learning happens when you ‘do’—and when you ‘do’ in the context of mentorship.

Here is a reality check—a little test if you will—to see how close to operating as an entrepreneur you really are—especially in today’s highly competitive world that demands that you know how to accelerate the right action steps at the correct time:

1. You are NOT really serious about business until you understand that business is about doing in the context of working with a business coach. How much longer are you going to fool yourself into that thinking doing business means reading books, watching to DVDs or listening to audio programs?

2. Point #1 doesn’t mean that I am against reading books, listening to audio programs or watching DVDs. The key in doing business is that you integrate your learning immediately into a new context of business acceleration that will assure that your ideas are profitable and are generating cash flow. (What’s the test of a great idea? Is it making you money—right now and NOT tomorrow.)

3. The ‘doing’ part of business involves you absorbing business concepts and practicing them in real time. One of the concepts I teach my clients is to create their front and backend programs at the same time with a proprietary system that focuses on knowing how to embed sales and marketing inside of their training programs. My mantra with my clients is this: “Educate to dominate”. In order to do this you need to know how to execute faster than your competitors. It is the area of execution that real business growth and entrepreneurship is developed.

Pure and simple, real business is about knowing how to execute strategically and in real time. True entrepreneurship is about integrating sales and marketing into an educational model that allows you to trump any competitor.

To Big Profits With Your IP!

Glenn

P.S.

Watch this short video from my backyard…

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One of the hallmarks of my business is that I focus on value. I am constantly looking for new ways to add more and more value to my existing clients. I regularly invest in myself, so I am learning and growing, and have more expertise to bring to them. I regularly create new programs and models to help them learn and implement faster and better. I bring on top trainers and coaches to guide my clients to faster success. In short, I focus on multiple ways I can continually add increasing value. This approach serves several very important functions within my business.

Create More Value, Make More Money

When clients note that I am continually adding more value, they feel validated in their decision to invest with me in the first place. They, like all of us, want to feel they are receiving their money’s worth. (I, though, often focus on giving them MORE than their money’s worth.) They want to feel they made a smart decision by working with me, and I want to do everything I can to prove their decision was a good one. Also, by continually testing new techniques and strategies, I am able to cut short their learning curve, so they reach positive cash flow and see significant results very quickly.

This has a subtle, but powerful benefit for me as well- when my clients are succeeding, they naturally tell others about it. This works to drive referrals into my business mentoring program. My client’s success then turns to benefit me.

When people hear the word “persistent”, they often think of “pushy”- and most of us have enough negative associations with sales and selling that we never want to be seen as a “pushy salesperson.” We don’t want to be like that used car salesman who keeps pestering us about the latest and greatest deal on a piece of junk we don’t even want.

Create More Value, Make More Money

The good news is that you don’t need to be pushy to sell high end programs and services. The truth is, though, that you need to be persistent. The difference between pushy and persistent has to do with positioning and target market. A salesperson is considered pushy if he keeps using the same strategy or technique to try and sell to someone who is not interested. The pushy salesperson has most likely not positioned himself well in the first place, and he may not have targeted his client well in the second place.

Contrast that to a persistent salesperson who has strong positioning and has selected his target well. The persistent salesperson realizes that with proper positioning and correct target market selection, it’s no longer a question of IF the sale will be made- it has become just a question of WHEN. The persistent salesperson realizes that he might need to deeply educate his target, and that this education should only proceed with a sales process embedded within it. It would be foolish to simply educate without some call to action or selling process at the end.

Yet many entrepreneurs will educate their markets over and over and over, and never move their target client towards a sale. What’s the point of that? I’m all for education (being a former Vice Principal), but I see education in the business world as being most valuable when it is tied to sales and marketing. You can educate your market very well, but if you never close a sale, your business will fail.

So the idea is that each of us need to be persistent salespeople, and keep sharing our passion and enthusiasm and our message to the right clients in the right way at the right time. Then the sale becomes a WHEN? not an IF.