Value

There seems to be an unlimited number of business gurus out there at the moment vying for the role of coaching entrepreneurs in all aspects of the business world.

“Coaching" seems to be the new buzz word that we keep hearing, and as ever there are a variety of different interpretations of what essentially is what we used to call consulting. Don’t get me wrong, I am of course a big fan of coaching, and have two that I use myself, I just tend to be wary when a new spin on an old idea starts taking hold!

Recently I attended an invigorating all day seminar where the familiar mantra of "be coachable" was pronounced at every opportunity (check out Les Brown for more being coachable inspiration). If you are being syndical, the reason for this seemed pretty transparent, as coaching is effectively what was being sold, at what on first appearance, seemed like extremely high prices.

The value of the coaching, we were told, was in the potential of what could be achieved once given the knowledge and then applying it. However, I found myself asking the question, "how valuable is this coaching and what is it really worth?"

During the seminar the speaker explained how he was charged hundreds of thousands of dollars by his own coach, based on how much he was likely to earn as a result of the learning. This seemed like a totally unreasonable amount of money on the surface, however the speaker was happy to pay it due to the high return on the investment he received. To him, it was actually amazingly good value.

So, the speaker took a decision to pay an extremely large amount of cash in exchange for the coaching sessions. He then went on to adjust his business in accordance with his coach's advice and went on to earn millions as a result.

“people don’t value what they don’t pay for”

The whole thing would have been a huge waste of money however, if the speaker had not applied what he had learnt and followed through with huge commitment and effort. It's a fascinating piece of phycology that having paid thousands for being coached, the incentive to make it work was enormous, and therefore more likely to work.

We often value that which we pay more for and in the world of coaching if we only pay a small amount of money, we're much less likely to take action with the learning.

An example of this principle in reverse occurs within our BLAM partnership programme. As part of the programme, all partners receive a full resource centre of all the knowledge that we have built up over years from selling hundreds of websites and apps. The value of this knowledge when added up, based on what it has earned all of our partners past and present is millions of pounds. Yet, what we find is that the resource centre is generally not exploited to the full despite it being freely available to all members. We have a record of how it is accessed and by whom and it's fascinating to see it's usage. A great saying from Oren Klaff springs to mind, “people don’t value what they don’t pay for”.

It's interesting to speculate what the usage would have been in our resource centre if we had made it an optional extra that partners had to pay for. How much more I wonder would it be used (we're not doing this btw!), and how much more successful would our network of partners be?

My point being that what ever product or service you are selling, be mindful of selling the value not the price. Often I see small business owners underselling themselves as they have an idea about their price being too expensive. We have some BLAM Partners that will sell a product for three times as much as another without any difficulty, and it’s essentially the same product. These are the partners that are selling the value not the price.

If you equate your product or service to its value rather than its price, it's an excellent opportunity to help the buyer take action and improve your businesses perception whilst doing so. So I urge you to take a long look at your business and think, what are my products and services really worth to my customers? And even if you don’t charge your prices, you need to let your customers know your real value.