FREE Teleclass: A Marketing Mindset for Success
Success with your practice begins with the right mindset…
Too often, counselors and holistic health practititioners face an uphill struggle when building their practice because of their misguided and negative beliefs
about marketing and what it takes to be successful at building a practice. Until you address these unhelpful and faulty beliefs, regardless of what you do, you likely will remain frustrated.
Even if you have accepted that you have to market and have some marketing skills, there still
may be beliefs getting in the way of your success. Often, we overcome certain beliefs which allow us to advance to the phase, only to disccover there are a new set of beliefs that we now have to overcome before we can reach the next level of success.
By attending "A Marketing Mindset for Success," you will learn:
-
common attitudes and thought processes that counsellors and healers frequently have that interfere with having
a successful practice -
the characteristics of a mindset of success
Date: Monday, December 11, 2006
Time: 5:00pm-6:00pm Pacific Time (8:00pm-9:00pm Eastern).
To Register:
1. Send a blank email to: Mindset Success
2. You will then receive an email asking for CONFIRMATION that you
have registered.
You MUST click on the link in that email to
confirm your registration.
3. You will then be sent an email with instructions for making the
call.
To read the article, A Marketing Mindset for Success, published in my most recent issue of my ezine, Enlightened Marketing, click here.
Are You Investing in Your Emotional Bank Account?
I have met a lot of therapists and healers this month–first during my recent talk and workshop in Longmont Colorado and then here in Vancouver a few weeks ago when I launched The Marketing Dialogues. What I repeatedly see is folks who not only don’t know much about how to be successful at marketing, but who have a lot of fears and limiting beliefs that prevent them from succeeding.
And while I have written about this here and in other posts on this blog, I think it’s important to keep discussing, because while counsellors and healing professionals may have more fears and limiting beliefs than most, it is a problem for many folks in business. And it is these emotional issues that seem to hold people back from growing in their private practice or business.
Website Conversion Expert says that 99% of what holds people back are emotional problems, not business problems. Dan points out that you must invest in your emotional bank account if you want to achieve success. You have to feel good about yourself, your business and the people around you.
Marketing is an Ongoing Process, Not a One – Time Event
As someone who practices counseling or one of the healing arts, how much time do you spend marketing your practice every day?
Do you have a marketing plan that spans out over the next year at least?
Do you have a structure in place for when you engage in marketing activities? If so, do you give them the same priority to as you do your clients?
Do you regularly follow-up with referral sources or prospective clients?
If you are having difficulty building your practice and are not doing any of these things on a regular basis, you are likely never going to attract the number of clients that you need in order to build a private practice that is successful.
Many counselors, holistic practitioners, and other healing professionals consistently suffer from the “feast and famine syndrome". They either don’t market their services at all, and hope for the best, or they market sporadically with no real plan in place. Often when they finally start getting clients, they stop marketing until their client load gets low again and then they panic and start marketing again. This endless cycle leaves them feeling frustrated.
As Steven Von Yoder points out, Marketing is a Process, Not an Event. It’s the little things that you do consistently over time that will get you enough clients to fill your private practice. You need to have an integrated marketing plan in place that allows you to follow-up on your marketing methods on an ongoing basis.
Marketing should be something you take as seriously as the work you do with your clients. It’s a process of doing a lot of little things consistently instead of expecting instant success.
“I’d Rather Die Than Market My Practice”
Does that sound like you?
The other day I received an email from a Counselor starting a private practice who told me she would rather die than promote or market her private practice. The day before that a Healer who had only one client told me that she goes to her office on most days and waits for clients to show up. She too advised me that she really dislikes marketing. And yesterday a Massage Therapist who was working in a clothing store told me that she was building her practice but that she is not a marketer, she is really a Healer and an Artist.
There are a lot of counselors, therapists and healers who have woken up and realized that these kinds of thoughts and behaviors will get them nowhere fast. Consequentially they have made the shift in their attitudes and actions by learning how to promote their private practice effectively.
However, I still hear these kinds of statements on a regular basis. And often with these attitudes comes the belief that somehow magically the clients are just going to appear just because they want them to.
So, what is my point? I have written about these issues many times, and I imagine I will continue to as long as I keep seeing them. I guess I am wondering what the difference is between the practitioners I have described above and those who realize that they must market, that it won’t kill them if they do, that marketing can be honest and fun, and that they have to learn marketing knowledge and skills. In essence, what is the difference between those that choose success and those who don’t?
While I already know many of these differences, I am interested to hearing other’s thoughts. I will undoubtedly be writing more about this in the future, so keep posted.
Is Building Your Practice Overwhelming You?
A while back I pointed to a pod cast on managing overwhelm. Since it is a topic that comes up often with my clients in relation to building a private practice, I thought I would write a few tips that have worked for me when it has felt like it’s all too much to manage:
1. Review your goals. Are they realistic? Are they manageable? Are they still relevant?
Do they need to be more focused or fine tuned? It is easy to feel overwhelmed when you are lacking clarity around your goals or have not set them appropriately.
2. Plan your marketing days and times. Your marketing time should be scheduled into your appointment book just like you schedule in your clients. If you don’t treat marketing activities with the same importance as your clients, you will constantly find that you are struggling to get things done.
3. Find a structure for your marketing that you can follow. Set completion tasks for each day, week, month, etc. Develop or use systems and tools that will help you do this.
4. Know that you can’t and don’t have to do everything. Decide what is manageable given your time and energy and how quickly you want to achieve your goals. Choose a few marketing strategies that you can implement to the best of your abilities and act on them.
5. Remember to get help. Even the most experienced marketers need additional help and support from time to time. In fact, those that do best have regular input from others, whether it’s through professional consulting or coaching, a mastermind group, partnering with colleagues (joint ventures) or informal networking or gatherings tend to achieve greater success than those who try to do it all alone.
Looking for Someone to Blame for Your Lack of Private Practice Success?
I read a very interesting post by Charlie Cook today that reports on research by Fiona Lee and Larissa Tiedens of Stamford 2004 that showed that businesses that blamed themselves and internal factors for poor performance performed better one year later.
Now, of course as a counsellor or healing professional in private practice you are very different than a large business. However, the idea of blaming yourself for not getting the results you want is a good practice.
I am not talking about blaming yourself to the point where you become immobilized to do anything to the change the situation. I am referring to taking responsibility for what isn’t working in your private practice and then finding the solutions to turn things around.
If you are not getting the number of clients you want, accept that you are doing something wrong and find out what you need to do differently.
The more you take responsibility for your failures, the more opportunity you have for learning how to do things better next time. Marketing a private practice or any business successfully is not something you can learn to do overnight. It is a skill that takes a lifetime to master.
New Year’s Resolutions, Goals and Intentions
Happy New Year everyone!
I hope you all have completed your marketing planning for 2006. If you haven’t you might want to get on that right away. If you missed my most recent ezine article called Marketing Tips for 2006, you can get it here. You might also find the article, Increase Your Success: Develop a Marketing Plan helpful.
If you have trouble setting goals or New Year’s Resolutions for your business, you might want to take a look at this post called The Best of Intentions, by Michele Miller at WonderBranding.
Michele discusses the problems people have keeping to New Year’s Resolutions and suggests that you set "intentions" instead of resolutions. Setting intentions is a right-brained activity and can lead to more creativity and may be easier to achieve. As Michele states: "To have an intention is to give yourself permission to live a fuller life, with plenty of room for growth".
Whether you set resolutions, goals or intentions for 2006, do make sure you have a plan and write it down. You can’t get somewhere, if you don’t know where you are going. 
Turning Towards Success
What moments have you had while building your private practice that were turning points? Those times where something happened and you learned something important about marketing your private practice.
Perhaps you were struggling to get clients and there was a point at which things turned around for you. Or maybe you had a difficult time with a particular marketing strategy you tried.
Often it is at those moments of utter frustration or despair that you have to make the choice: will you continue or will you give up? Will you give into to failure, or turn towards success?
For many counselors and other healing professionals, marketing a private practice can be one of the most challenging things they will ever do. It’s a time consuming and often frustrating process. Only those who hang in there for the long haul succeed. Often there will be many mini "failures" along the way and sometimes there will be big "failures."
I have certainly had my share of frustrations and "failures" along the way and I have seen many of my clients and other practitioners experience the same. What has kept all of us going is the desire to succeed– making a choice to do whatever it takes to get there. This one decision, more than anything else, is the reason for my success. Whenever things don’t go as planned or as I want, I reaffirm my desire to succeed and keep turning towards success.
What is your choice?
The Benefits of Competition When Marketing Your Private Practice
The topic of competition when marketing your private practice has come up again a few times lately with clients and at a presentation I was giving so I thought it was about time to say a few words on the subject.
When you are struggling to get clients it is easy to get caught up in a scarcity mentality where you fear that if you tell someone what you are doing they are going to do the same thing. Although understandable, this kind of thinking can actually cause you to struggle even more and even cause you to end up failing miserably. Why? Because it takes a great deal of energy and positive thinking to succeed. If you are walking around fearing other practioners are taking your clients you won’t have the time or energy to focus on what you have to do to succeed.
Now I am not saying you have to devulge all your ideas to everyone all the time, or that at times, you might not lose business to "competitors." However, I am also not suggesting that you ignore your competition. We are talking about balance here. You do need to know what your competition is doing so that you know how to position yourself in the market. However, you will actually be more successful if you can think from the perspective of how you can benefit from your competition.
Benefits of competition? Yes, there are many. In fact, I believe in the new style of marketing where we see our competition as allies instead of enemies that can do us harm. If you are good at what you do, have a clear and unique target market, have services that are in demand and know how to market your private practice effectively, there is no reason why you should fear your peers who are also in private practice.
Be confident in your marketing, know what you are doing and why and find a way to partner with your "competitors" as much as possible and think of them as allies. All will benefit in the long run.
How To Achieve Private Practice Success: Expect Marketing Miracles
John Jansch from Duct Tape Marketing wrote a post recently called, The Power of Positive Expectancy. While there is nothing novel about his post, it is a good reminder of the importance of having a positive attitude about succeeding in your private practice. To quote John:
If you expect your clients to be thrilled with your services - they will.
If you flat out expect your clients to refer business your way - they will.
If you know a direct marketing piece will make the phone ring - it will.
Marketing a practice is hard work and results take time. Even those who are normally extremely confident can become discouraged and allow negative thoughts to influence them.
It’s a pretty obvious, however, that you won’t be able to thrive in your private practice if you don’t believe you can. Of course you still need to know how to develop effective promotional materials and how to market your practice effectively, but without believing that you will attract the clients you want, it is highly unlikely that you will.
When my clients get discouraged I often tell them a story about when I was first building my practice and the times that doubts surfaced for me. I remember that while reading about people who had achieved success, I learned that most of them along the way maintained an attitude that they would be successful. After hearing this several times, something in my brain "clicked’ with my attitude towards my own success. I can clearly recall that moment when I decided that I was going to succeed.
From that point on, everything changed. I simply decided that I was going to do whatever it took to succeed…And I did.
