How to Keep Potential Clients from Dismissing You As Old News

Introduction

Welcome to a new Heart of Business Practitioner.

Jason Stein has joined Judy Murdoch as an official Heart of Business practitioner, available to help you one-on-one with your business. Like Judy, Jason brings a lot of experience and unique insights.

Jason has a speciality in working with entrepreneurial parents and is trained in Nonviolent Communication. He has been a coach for years and has a deep familiarity with Heart of Business approaches, having been a past client, as well as teaching our material to acupuncture students in his position as Director of Professional Development at the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine.

I’m jazzed he’s with us. If you’re interested in one-on-one help, check out our Organic Business Development Program and see whether Judy or Jason resonates with you more. I believe strongly in both of them.

Article: How to Keep Potential Clients from Dismissing You As Old News

If you spend time reading about marketing at all, sooner or later you come across what is called the Unique Selling Proposition, or U.S.P. Kinda fancy language for what makes you different from others.

And difference is good, because why should that perfect client hire you instead of someone else?

However, thinking about this may really tie you up in knots, because, hey, what really does make you unique? Can you be unique?

Uniqueness is Unique

What I mean by that genius statement is that uniqueness is not what you’re looking for. There is only one Unique, and that is Source—only one of those things.

What makes you unique as a human being is the unique way Source is presenced through you. Since Uniqueness is a quality of the Divine, your uniqueness is not yours, and it’s a little hard to describe. What makes you you? Can you put that in language that makes sense to people? I didn’t think so.

So, you’re not really looking for “unique.”

You’re Looking For the Missing Ingredient

Your clients, the people who you serve, have already tried to solve the problem you help them solve. Many of them have really worked hard at it. Really hard. Really, really hard. They’ve tried all kinds of stuff to fix it.

Here’s a shortish exercise: take a moment now and list a bunch of things that your clients have typically already tried, but didn’t really get the full results they wanted until they found you.

Good. Now, take a look at that list. What is it that you provide that all of those other things are missing? You might provide a bunch of stuff, many different modalities, but what’s the one thing, perspective, understanding, world view, etc., that makes the difference to your clients.

There may be lots of people out there who provide something similar to what you offer, but for your clients, there’s one thing you bring that really makes the difference for them.

Finding The One Thing Takes Humility

Humility is important because what you do may be on someone else’s list of things that didn’t quite work for them. Not because your thing doesn’t work, but because it’s missing an ingredient someone else’s clients need.

You don’t have to worry about it, though. Those people will go to that other person who is making that other list,which is to say that no one person has the ultimate answer.

And you have an answer that’s particularly effective with a particular group of people. Your people.

An Example, You Say?

Well, here’s an example. How about an acupuncturist who delivers top-notch acupuncture pretty much like other great acupuncturists?

Only this acupuncturist, though, happens to see a particular something in his patients. He knows his patients have already tried a bunch of different therapies and are looking for something that works, but the significant missing piece for them is their struggle with bringing a whole new health regimen into their lives and making it stick.

And let’s say this acupuncturist also is a big disciple of David Allen’s Getting Things Done . If you don’t know about David Allen, he’s a big guru of productivity with a very smart and complete system on … getting things done.

There’s lots and lots of people who are disciples of David Allen and can help you implement it. But what would you have if an acupuncturist could help you not just in Chinese medicine, but in creating new health habits in your life that really make a difference?

Well then, you’d have Eric Grey, co-founder of Watershed Community Wellness in Portland.

Eric has found a missing ingredient and supplied it. He’s not “unique.” There may be other holistic health practitioners who support their clients in creating new health habits. But he’s unique to his clients.

This Is Not The Same As A Niche

A niche, or target market, refers to who you help and the problems you help them with, in their own words. Clients who come to Eric may be struggling to create new habits with their health, but it’s not what’s really getting their goat.

Eric is here to help people in their 40’s and older who are noticing that age is catching up to them, and who want to age gracefully, without just watching their bodies break down.

His uniqueness has to do with how he delivers that help—combining Chinese medicine with a particular way of supporting creating healthier habits.

Get the difference?

Uniqueness Keeps You From Being Old News

The main benefit of finding your unique ingredient is that it helps to stop comparison in the minds of your clients. When someone comes across something known or unknown, the mind automatically wants to slot it into a category.

Say someone already knows about massage and they come across some other kind of body work that may be radically different than Swedish massage, say cranial-sacral work, they still think, “Oh, that’s just another kinda massage,” which means they might entirely dismiss cranial-sacral as “old news.”

For Eric’s clients, in a city like Portland, it’s easily possible they already have had an experience with acupuncture.

If Eric did the short exercise above, on his website he could list out a bunch of things that someone may have already tried. He may even list “acupuncture.”

So he jumps in with: “And you may have gotten some results, but they didn’t really stick. What’s missing?”

Badabing, his missing ingredient comes out. “While these different things definitely help, the ingredient that is often missing are the habits in your daily life that make the changes stick. But will-power doesn’t seem to work. Is there a way to combine the effectiveness of great holistic medicine with new health habits that you really stick to without torturing yourself?”

Suddenly, Eric’s new client is sitting up and paying attention in a very different way.

Did You Notice the Humility?

Eric doesn’t have to trumpet his qualifications at this point. He doesn’t have to make someone feel stupid for not following through. He just brings in the missing ingredient, and suddenly his offer feels unique and powerful, without him needing to inflate his ego.

There Is More To The Marketing Message

It’s true that the missing ingredient, what some people call “uniqueness,” isn’t the entire marketing message. But if you can bring this insight into your marketing, it can make a world of difference to the people who want to become your clients, who want to pay attention and jump in with you but are unconsciously dumping you in a pile of other things they’ve already tried.