The life coaching field has experienced exponential growth in the last two decades. As the demand for coaching services increases, so does competition between coaches. As such, coaches are increasingly seeking to improve their marketing efforts to attract clients by offering differentiated services and adding an extra notch of quality in their overall product offer. A very common way service professionals achieve this is the interesting - and potentially risky - art of over-delivering (and under-promising).
But what exactly is over-delivering? Over-delivering is providing a level of service over and above that expected or anticipated for the service provided. Over-delivery is providing a level of service beyond what you’ve promised your client in your marketing message.
An example of service over-delivery would be to provide your client with a surprise complimentary gift after the first session. The gift may be in the form of a tele-coaching session, a seminar, a book, or perhaps a voucher to the movies or a massage session.
Many astute coaches actually provide services of other business professionals in order to provide their over-delivery. For example, in the case of a free massage above, you may be able to do a deal with a health spa that is willing to provide a complimentary session to your clients in the anticipation that your client will continue to use their service in the future. This type of arrangement is a powerful will to all parties. You are able to provide your client with an added benefit, the health spa gets a potential long term client for low cost, and your client gets a free massage.
The intention of service over-delivery is to build goodwill with your clients. It’s intended that this goodwill will translate into business benefits for you. Those benefits may be longer client contracts, increased referral and stronger product endorsement.
Generally your perceived gain from over-delivering your service would be greater than your cost to provide the additional benefit to your client. (In the above example your cost is actually zero). Clearly it’s very important that you take into consideration the cost of over-delivery in your financial planning. When engaging in this process, you must be aware of the cost/benefit relationship that will arise from it, ensuring that for every cost involved, there is a mutual benefit.
However, every investment requires a systematic approach in order to be successful - and over-delivering is not different. You’ll need to establish goals in order to measure the outcomes of your efforts, and also to avoid having financial problems due to an ill planned promotion. You can include the following points in your over-delivery strategy:
(a) Establish primary objectives
List each advantage of over-delivering in a priority order. Referrals, networking and partnership possibilities are all reasons for this type of promotion. Your primary objectives will also be parallel to your current position in the market: whether you have just started your business, included a new service, found a new niche, etc.
(b) Find a target market
The main objective of over-delivering is to provide more satisfaction to customers. For this reason, look for groups that can offer a great deal of options for your business, such as networking possibilities. Once you’ve established the right target, you’ll be able to refine your promotion and possibly calculate the most likely outcomes of each interaction.
(c) Choose your gift
Now that you’ve decided what your target market is, you need to decide on what you are going to offer. You may provide extra services of your own, or negotiate with a local service provider to exchange vouchers for referrals. There are many options to choose from, but the most important thing is to ensure that whatever the gift is, it will have some value to the client.
(d) Create protocols
You are going to face a constant trade-off between the amount of extra time you are going to spend with ‘give-aways’ and how much you can actually spend. Creating protocols will help you to balance this equation and ensure you’ll neither go too far on over-delivering, nor too low. It will also give you enough flexibility to deal with various opportunities that may arise throughout the process.
You have now established your primary goals, target market, marketing strategies and resource requirements. The next step is to actually apply them to the real world. Because people respond well to incentives, it is only natural that your clients will respond positively to your service over-delivery. Compare your results with what you’ve planned, and if needed, make some adjustments.
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