Private Practice Success Newsletter

July 2005, by Lynn Grodzki, LCSW, PCC (Professional Certified Coach)
www.privatepracticesuccess.com

One minute summary: Marketing may be the most hated word in private practice. Most of the therapists, coaches and healing professionals I meet tell me that they can't stand marketing their practices. If you fall into this camp, read on for ways to make the process of marketing more appealing to you, and more welcome for your potential clients and referral sources.

Marketing by Attraction

As a therapist, coach, or healing professional, you face a frustrating dilemma: Having a flow of clients may depend as much on the quality of service you offer as on your ability to close the sale.

You trained and even sacrificed to become a professional who would help others; but your training may not have included any mention of marketing, promotion, advertising, or sales. As a result, if marketing is one of your least favorite words, you are not alone.

For those in the helping professions, marketing is often synonymous with “push” marketing — shameless overpromising, blatant promotion, or selling and even seducing, the direct opposite of helping and healing.

If this is how you regard marketing, your are right on one account: push marketing is rarely an effective strategy for generating referrals in a business as relational as therapy, coaching, or healing. Most of us have had some experience being on the other end of promotional marketing and know what it feels like to be someone else's prospect. It rarely inspires confidence in the seller.

Push marketing also ignores the complexity of all phases of a helping relationship, including the important beginning phases. Since push marketing tends to be so linear in process, you can’t help sounding as though you are after one thing — closing the sale.

So what’s a better solution when you need clients? Consider “pull” marketing, also called marketing by attraction, which tends to work best for professional service businesses. Attraction means conveying the best of yourself as a professional and the distinctiveness of your practice, as you build relationships within your community.

The most minute transformation is like a pebble dropped into a still lake. The ripples spread out endlessly.

Emmanuel

When done well, marketing by attraction works like a magnet, allowing those clients who need your services to naturally gravitate toward you. To do this kind of marketing, you need to align yourself with your business. Integrate your articulation of your strengths and services as a professional with a marketing plan based on your preferred style of outreach. Then leave the safety of your office and begin to consistently interact with the community around you.

Since attraction marketing is nonlinear, it will help you develop and mature as a person and a business owner. Here’s the bad news: All maturing creates some tension and anxiety, even just in the process of stretching into new behaviors. If you tend to be an introvert, not used to publicly speaking about yourself, and not comfortable meeting others, even attraction marketing will cause you some nervous moments. But just like any new skill, you learn by doing, and SMALL STEPS COUNT!

In the depth of winter, I finally realized that deep within me there lay an invincible summer.

Albert Camus

Think about planting a garden. Consider attraction marketing as a way of seeding relationships in your community that will flower over time into a rich diversity of networks, opportunities, and client referrals.

One of my colleagues moved across the country from her previous practice and had to start over, rebuilding her practice, knowing no one. She seeded relationships by deciding she would meet a new professional in her community each week for one year. She made a list of 50 types of professionals that she wished to add to her rolodex and looked for the best — a good printer to design her new brochures, an experienced massage therapist to help her calm her own stress, a noted financial planner, other therapists, coaches, and healers who would be part of her new network. By just asking around, she filled in one name for each type of profession. She had the makings of a mini high-quality chamber of commerce, right on her rolodex.

Then she make it a point to meet each person on her list, one at a time, each week, face-to-face. The meeting might take the form of a lunch date or she might just drop into their place of work and introduce herself, explaining what she was doing, making a list of the best professionals in town for her own purposes. Each professional was flattered to be added to her rolodex, and by the end of the year she had seeded fifty relationships, who were part of her new network. With time, some of them became very good referral sources.

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

Peter Drucker

Most marketing strategies are deceptively simple in conception: achieving them is the hard part. To make it easier, get well prepared. Spend time first developing compelling marketing materials; hone your verbal articulation in regard to explaining your work; create a support network to lean back on when times get tough; don’t think of starting without a clearly written plan, with markers, dates and specifics, so you can keep on track and note your progress over time.

Very often, the difference between a successful marketing strategy and one that fails is simply the element of time; don’t give up too soon. Detach from focusing on the results of your marketing, and enjoy the process of meeting others and stretching into new behaviors. After a year of attraction marketing, you can develop more ease in meeting new and interesting people and may find yourself at the center of a diverse professional community, one that you fashioned via your own efforts.

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Books by Lynn Grodzki, published by WW Norton. To order, click on each book.

	The Business and Practice of Coaching By Lynn Grodzki and Wendy Allen (Summer 2005) An estimated 30,000 coaches have entered the coaching profession in the past five years, but unfortunately, the majority report they are unable to earn a living wage from their coaching services. This book shows you how, using a coaching approach to the business of coaching.
	Building Your Ideal Private Practice By Lynn Grodzki (2000) The best-selling guide to what you need to do and who you need to be in order to have a highly profitable, personally satisfying private practice. Often called the "private practice bible" this book has become a resource for tens of thousands of your colleagues.
	The New Private Practice:Therapist-Coaches Share Stories, Strategies and Advice Edited by Lynn Grodzki (2002) A groundbreaking look at the profession of coaching through the eyes of 16 successful therapist-coaches who tell you how to become a coach, what to charge, and show you how they coach their clients.
	12 Months to Your Ideal Private Practice: A Workbook By Lynn Grodzki (2003) This planned, motivational workbook will help you build the practice you desire. The workbook incorporates fresh ideas, new exercises, further skill sets and much more to give you a direct experience of being carefully coached by Lynn, month-by-month, for a full year.

More next time,

lynn@privatepracticesuccess.com
See the website for additional articles, information about individual coaching, and upcoming classes.