There you sit, your heart brimming with love, and your business newly-launched. You do a few “marketing” things like put up a website, show up at a few events, hand out a few business cards. Maybe you even go 1980’s on us and put up flyers.
Then phone call comes in. “As soon as I saw your [website, business card, flyer] I just knew I had to work with you.” And they did, and they are a perfect client.
And, you know what? A few of those kinds of phone calls, emails, meetings keep coming in. “It’s the Love!” you surmise. So you put your heart into all kinds of intentions and prayer and other practices that feel great to your heart.
But the flow doesn’t really increase. Maybe it seems to bump up occasionally, and then back down again. And you did your best with it.
Maybe it wasn’t the Love?
What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Let’s be clear about this: attraction is love. Whether someone is attracted to you romantically or as a client, love is the basis of attraction. According to the Sufis, love is one of the elemental 99 qualities of the Divine, one of the many building blocks of the created world.
We thirst for love, and when we encounter love, our hearts are pulled toward it. If you have love in your business, people move toward you.
So How Come So Few People?
Those clients do come through, the ones that seem “fated” to work with you. And especially early in your business, before you have much other marketing going on, it can seem like that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
Who needs all this marketing stuff if people just show up like that? Actually you and I do, because just as it’s the solution, the problem is also the love.
Love freaks us out. Think about it: when you encounter love, your world tends to be turned upside down. Everything can change in a moment, and all of the comforts and familiarity of your world can be washed away in a tsunami of love. Your heart doesn’t care, but the rest of you certainly does.
Because some people do come to you in these serendipitous ways, it becomes easy to believe that that’s the way it’s supposed to happen. Unfortunately, you will probably never get the numbers of clients you need to support yourself based only on love.
The Missing Piece Is Safety
To counter the freak-out effect of love, you need equal doses of safety. And that’s where we come to marketing. Marketing is not meant to attract people to you, love does that job.
What marketing does is provide the safety your best clients need in order to approach the love and caring you’re providing in your business. Safety comes in different forms for different people. I want to take a look at four of them, with examples from my long-time friend Adam Kayce’s website. He’s a fantastic web designer, having designed our last website and currently working on the relaunch of our membership site, The Business Oasis.
1. Empathy
True empathetic statements, where you sincerely express that you get the pain they are in, creates tremendous safety. Why? Because when people feel like their pain is seen, then they can relax knowing that you probably won’t be trying to cause them more pain.
When marketing pros tell you to “talk about the pain!” this is why it works. However, if it’s not true empathy that flows out of your compassionate heart, people will suspect they are being gamed.
An empathetic statement can be quite simple: “Running your own business is a huge job. Not only do you have to know your business, but you’ve got oodles of other hats to wear at the same time… marketer, webmaster, bookkeeper, customer service, you name it. And while it makes sense to farm out certain aspects of your business to others, there are some things that it’s best you handle yourself.” From Bright Coconut.
If this isn’t you, then you probably don’t relate. But for the folks struggling to run a business, bingo. Just reading it probably helps you breathe a sigh of relief, because the guy who wrote this gets it.
2. Hope
After empathy comes hope. If you try to go for hope before empathy, they won’t believe you. Why not? Because the easy answer to hope is, “Oh, but you haven’t seen the mess I’m in.” Empathy lets them know that you have seen the mess they are in, so the hope has a chance of really landing.
And not just any kind of hope, but hope that says there is a solution for the problem they are facing. Too much hope can sound ridiculous, “Yes you CAN make a million dollars in the next 90 minutes!” But a grounded, heart-centered expression that a solution is possible can really create trust.
Nothing fancy, keep it simple: “Now, that doesn’t mean you need to become a boat builder. You just have to know how to run your website, make the changes you need to make, and be able to do the things with it that your business requires. And it’s precisely that level of expertise that Bright Coconut is geared to help you with.” From Bright Coconut.
Of course, you can see that by itself it sounds kinda unbelievable. “Yeah, right.” That’s why the empathy is so important before hand.
3. Values
Expressing a sense of your tribe, what values your tribe holds, what your tribe cares about brings a critical piece of safety to people. A primal fear in humans is that if we make a taboo choice, we’ll be thrown out of our group, that we’ll lose our home.
A consultant once told me about a conversation he had with a marketing VP of a global corporation, whose name you would recognize. “This VP told me,” he said, “that they knew their customers bought based not partly, not mostly, but entirely on their values.”
It’s the first, and often unconscious, consideration in any buyer’s mind–Are you my people? Are you a coconut person?
“Where’d the name “Bright Coconut” come from?
Well, I’m a huge fan of coconuts, to be honest… I think they’re one of Nature’s wonderful gifts. Not a day goes by that I don’t eat something with coconut in it, and it’s easy for me to go into coconut withdrawals (you don’t want to be around me if that happens. I warn you now). In fact, if you share a yummy, non-sugary coconut-based recipe with me, I’ll be your friend forever.”
From Bright Coconut
It’s more than just the words, it’s the tone he takes. Do you feel like you are part of Adam’s tribe? If you do, then you’re going to feel just that much safer. If you love coconuts, it helps. But beyond coconuts, do you relate to someone who cares about something like that and puts it out there? It’s a little quirky, and that may be the key to acknowledging your quirkiness.
Presto, you know you’re in the same tribe.
4. Proof
A final piece of safety that helps people approach the love you are offering is to give’em proof. Can you do what you say you can do?
If you have a service business, then testimonials, stories, and case studies are important here, especially if you can include facts, figures, and numbers. I know sometimes testimonials can seem cheesy, but the way to avoid the cheese is to make sure they are sincere and that they are long enough to include specific details that tell someone, “Oh, this is a real person.”
Of course, if you have a product that you deliver, you can also offer a demo:
Check out Bright Coconut’s demo (click on the “see demo” button a little ways down the page.
Good Versus Evil
Each of these four, empathy, hope, values and proof, have all been manipulated at times for the forces of evil. But please don’t shy away from them just because you’ve seen someone use them in a slimy way.
If you have love in your heart and sincerity in how you bring each of these forward, then safety will help to counteract the love freak-out effect. All those people who are headed towards your business but are waiting just outside of arms’ reach? They may just find the safety they need to take the final steps towards you.
They get the help they need, you get the help you need. Now that’s love in action.
And you? What kinds of things keep you feeling unsafe and uncertain when you approach a business you’re interested in?
