5-Session Guided Virtual Coaching Package
Learn how to add the magic of emotional engagement to your business.
The quality of your customer relationships has a direct relationship to the revenue you earn.
The better your customer relationship, the more revenue you receive.
But how do you improve your customer relationships?
Most people think that you need to hire a fancy design firm or advertising agency to create emotionally engaging experiences for your company.
That's not true.
Actually, many of the great companies today achieved fame and fortune doing this from the start. Think Airbnb, Warby Parker, Apple.
They grew because they engaged with their customers emotionally, built great relationships, and the result was that they generated a lot of revenue.
How can you do this for your company? Even if you have a "team of me," I'll show you how.
If you consider yourself a solopreneur or you have an early stage start-up with a handful of employees and want to connect with your customers emotionally, I can help you get started in 5 virtual coaching sessions.
What do I know about this? I developed a pretty solid solopreneur consulting business strictly through word-of-mouth. People would ask me how I grew my business, assuming that I used advertising and marketing gimmicks. But it was all through relationship building and emotional connection.
The work I did for clients in user experience, customer experience and content strategy leveraged many of the principles I address in the 5-step program. And those results were fantastic for their customers.
To get started, submit your name and email address and I'll send you links to:
- Schedule a 30 minute no obligation discussion to see if this coaching package is right for you (no charges or coaching sessions scheduled until you decide you want to move forward)
- Watch a free 1-hour recorded Master Class to give you an overview of what we will be discussing during the sessions
- Access a workbook to guide you through the 5-step process
- Access a 2-week free trial of the Gearmark Community for Customer Experiences or Experience Club
Mary Brodie, Founder & Strategist, Gearmark
Mary Brodie is an experience strategist and founder of Gearmark. She has been helping companies create memorable customer experiences, online and offline, for over 20 years. From apps to content strategy to lead gen programs, Mary has helped companies achieve results that contribute to the bottom line. Mary attended MIT, graduated from Simmons University with a BA and MA, and recently graduated from IE University in Madrid with an Executive Masters in Corporate Communication.
What can you disover in the recorded Master Class?
- How people make decisions
- How to learn more about your customers with the data you already have available
- What motivates your customers to take action
- How you can develop a better customer relationship
- What you can do to turn your results around right away
This class is for you if...
- You have changed your business strategies - marketing and sales - and want to reconsider its full impact on your customers.
- You think you have a targeted message, but you aren't connecting with your customers.
- Your customers seem to have a different perception of your what your company is and what it does than what you think.
- You think you know who your customers are, but their actions always continue to surprise you.
What you'll learn by the end of the 5 sessions:
- Insights into your target customer - who they are, the problem they really have, and what they want for a solution.
- Understand the problem that you truly solve and your solution from your customer's perspective.
- Identify an approach to communicate with your customer to make your solution a higher priority for them.
- Identify key messaging points that differentiate your company and highlight your unique solution.
- Develop a list of activities and tactics to make your company - and brand - come alive.
Do feelings really matter in decision making?
According to Antonio Damasio, YES! Most definitely.
Damasio discovered this in his work with "Elliott." Elliott had a brain tumor in the part of the brain that processed feelings. After some observation, Damasio discovered that Elliott could identify many solutions and options, but he couldn't make a decision as to which option was best. It's an involved story that I share in the Webinar (and has been shared in sources like MIT Technology Review, The Cut, Scientific American, and the like, as well as being the subject matter of many of Dr. Damasio's books). Check out the clip below.
The idea of a "being" making decisions to feel good extends from humans to animals to single-celled organisms. In all cases, feelings lead to emotions, and our desire to feel good influences our decision and choices.
I'm oversimplifying this all a bit, but you can also learn more in Damasio's book, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. And a bit is in the video below from the Webinar.
Master class clip: Why feelings and emotions matter when making decisions?
How about meaning and self-interest? What's their role?
Along with feelings and emotions, meaning and self-interest are the two other factors that cause people to make the decisions they do.
Vicktor Frankl's book, Man’s Search for Meaning, documented his experiences in the concentration camps during World War 2 to illustrate why meaning is the core to human existence.
We all require meaning in our lives to make sense of why events happen to us and to help us survive. We are always looking to be part of a bigger story.
Imagine if your company represented something bigger? Or if your brand provided a vision, that bigger story to your customers? Most likely, you would then be able to connect with your customers emotionally. Customers don’t want to just buy a widget from you; they want to be part of what you are creating in the world, part of how your company is making a difference.
Self-interest could be illustrated as the motivation behind why we do what we do. It's not always clear or straightforwad and there may be subconscous emotional reasons why we do what we do. In the end, we choose what we do so we feel good about our decision.
The Webinar includes an example of how all 3 of these factors influence people to make the decisions that they do.
Another excerpt from the class.
Value and worth - it's not what you think.
They have recursive definitions, which makes talking about them challenging to say the least.
Master class clip: Value and worth
Where emotional engagement starts:
Empathy, Compassion, or Both?
We all think we love our customers. But do we? How do we know? And why is this important?
It's hard to help your customers solve their problems if you don't like them, nevermind love them.
What are some signs that you don't like them?
- You or your team members talk about your customers behind their back
- You honestly don't think your customers are smart people who make great decisions
- You may have unflattering nicknames for your customers that, if they knew what they were, they would stop talking to you
- You don't take their problems seriously to get them fixed and see their calls as a bother during your day
- You think that their intentions are malicious
You may think, "So what? They don't know what I say or think about them behind their back!"
What if I told you that they do know. They can tell based on how you treat them.
How do you know if you are treating a customer with love and compassion (or not)?
Let's review the definition of pity, sympathy, empathy, and compassion.
We sometimes forget that pity to compassion is a sliding scale.
- With pity you feel a type of contempt, and believe that your customer got themselves into their unfortunate situation, and probably can’t help themselves get out of it, even if they wanted to.
- If you feel sympathy, you feel bad for someone for getting into that situation, but you aren’t up to the task to help them solve their problem.
- If you feel empathy, you can feel your customer’s feelings and understand their emotions. There isn’t really a desire to help – the focus is on understanding.
- If you feel compassion, you don’t care how your customer got into that situation, but you can understand how they are feeling and want to help them solve their problem.
Where do you and your employees fall on this scale?
Why does this matter?
After this Master Class, you will develop greater empathy and compassion for your customers so you can give them what they need to succeed. And when you solve their problems and help them be successful, you are building a great relationship with them.
But this doesn't start until you understand and love them.
Great experiences build great customer relationships.
And great customer relationships increase revenue.
Here are the 5 steps we cover in the coaching sessions and in the webinar Master Class that help you include the magic of emotional engagement in your own exciting, repeatable customer experiences.
Step 1: Identify your customer
As always, know who your customer is. And we gather so much research information today from digital activities, there is no reason NOT to know this.
Step 2: Know the problem that they are trying to solve
Or the job to be done for the customer. We sometimes forget that customers may not have thought about their problem in the way we solve them.
Step 3: Know how your solution will help them
We'll discuss competition (industry, company, and payment method), value and worth, and why your customer isn't solving this problem right now. Your customer just may not see the problem you solve the same way you do.
Step 4: Determine what will motivate them to take the next step
My favorite section! Learn how emotions, feelings, meaning and self-interest contribute to everyone's decision making. Discover new love for Antonio Damasio and Vicktor Frankl. Antonio Damasio's work proves that feelings are required for decision making.
Step 5: Create a picture of what life could be like with the new solution
Customers need to see your solution in context with what they are familiar with in their own experience. Learn how to do this as well as include them in your customer community and express your brand authentically. And most of all, in this section you will understand why it's important for your employees to love your customers.
How much does this series of 5 coaching sessions cost?
This package of 5 virtual coaching sessions costs $1,000. I'll personally work with you through the 5-steps outlined in the workbook to gain insights into your business and better understand who you are targeting, what motivates them, and how to communicate to them.
As an alternative, you may decide to join the community and work through the 5-steps there ($254.99/yr or $24.99/month). It's less intensive, but just as valuable.
But before you commit to either option, let's have a 30-minute conversation so I can meet you, talk to you, and see how to best help you solve your challenges. This coaching package may be right for you; the community may be better. Before deciding, let's have a 30-minute no obligation conversation to discuss your options and discover what will best help you and your situation.
What do you get when you sign-up?
- A FREE 30-minute conversation with me to understand your situation and determine if this coaching package or community is right for you. You will also most likely receive any applicable advice I can give you to solve your challenges.
- Access to the free 1-hour recorded Master Class to give you an overview of what we will be discussing during the sessions.
- A workbook to guide you through the 5-step process.
- 2-week free trial of the Gearmark Community for Customer Experiences, or Experience Club.
I look forward to meeting you!
Why did I create this Master Class and Program?
I became fascinated with emotions and their role in decision making when I started working in content marketing and strategy. I realized that content and social media were creating automated digital conversations. And conversations were what sales used to help build a customer relationship.
But the biggest realization of all: companies sell to people. People are emotional beings. Sure, they care about product benefits and how a product will help them in their lives, but at the same time, they are people with feelings and emotions. They want to feel good about themselves and their decisions. I had a new mission: understanding how to engage digitally with people on a deeper level to build a relationship.
I experimented using this approach in a content marketing project and it worked! It's a long story (that you can read about in this blog), but I worked with a team to create an IT buyer's guide that was a hit. It was the top performing download for the division and got an annual revision 3-4 years after it was launched.
But after deeper reflection, I realized that I have been using this approach for years, starting with my first Gearmark project at a Bay area online digital printing company. They had a site, but it was difficult to use. However, their customers loved ordering print work from them. It wasn't just because they could pick up the print work down the street, but the work quality was excellent for the price.
I talked to a few customers to discover how they used the site. And they liked working with this company so much that they were willing to do all of these crazy workarounds to get the system to work as they wanted. They cared about finding the best print price and delivery date combination. They would select different print turnaround times and shipping costs to get the right combination.
They were cost conscious and time sensitive. They valued having the flexibility available to choose the right option for them.
So we created a shopping cart that allowed them to do that - choose the print turnaround time and the shipping time to see when they should expect the item and the total cost.
The improvement was an immediate hit! They had an ongoing spike in sales starting that day. By appealing to the customers' need for flexibility, we created a winner. (And the approach was copied across the industry too, so it must have worked.)
So...time to give it a try?
Still unsure?
Harvard Business Review recently issued a video that summarized a study demonstrating the impact of connecting emotionally with your customers. It drastically improved a retailer's bottom line. Further, researchers originally published an article promoting this idea in 2015. This approach to solve what seems like a complex customer problem where customers are just "stuck," not purchasing and not taking action, works.
Have questions?
copyright 2018, Gearmark LLC