Continuity programs are a highly desirable method of packaging your expertise because they are a great way to boost and stabilize your income. Is it the best choice in the careers industry, however? In my own years as a career coach and resume writer in addition to my work coaching career pros to grow their business, I’ve noticed some interesting caveats to this type of program.

For clarification, a continuity program could include associations, membership programs, and even platinum-style group or individual coaching. It provides ongoing benefits to your client in exchange for continuation in the program.The obvious benefit to you, the business owner, is recurring revenues and longer-term client retention.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Okay, so what about the caveats specific to the careers industry?

Job seekers often purchase services driven strongly by perceived urgent need… either out of a job already or concerned they may lose their job. Now you know that even the best resume or career coaching in the world isn’t a magic pill. A job search takes a certain amount of time, and it is rarely an overnight success story. That’s not what a job seeker in semi-crisis mode wants to hear though. They want to feel like success is just around the bend. I think even those who are intentionally choosing a job search to find a better job don’t like to think this process could take a long time. It’s more of a “necessary evil” to reach their dream job.

One big rule of marketing is to give people what they want, not what you think they need. So while you may believe your long-term continuity program is the perfect solution for them, the very thought of six months or a year in a program scares the daylights out of many job seekers.

My recommendation… if you’re working with job seekers, offer shorter continuity programs. Maybe three months or less. If you’re working with them in the realm of ongoing career management, you can get away with structuring a six-month or longer platinum program or even an indefinite membership-based program.

Those are my observations to-date, and if any of you career professionals have experienced a different reality with continuity programs, I’d love to hear what you’ve done and how well it’s worked for you and your clients.

I have long promoted the idea that business owners should choose up to three core marketing methods–and no more!–to promote their business. Otherwise, you wind up too diluted, and you aren’t able to effectively connect with your audience through any of the channels. Which equals tons of “busy work” on your part and not a heck of a lot of results.

Seth Godin talks about something similar in his recent blog post on creating a media channel strategy. I love how he takes the idea even further and suggests that the media channels we choose actually change who we are and what we do (in our business). Hmmm… a very worthy consideration when designing your business model!

No matter what stage your business is in, here are a few suggestions to help make your marketing and media channel strategy more effective:

- Limit your selection to three channels or methods. If we apply the 80/20 rule (20% of our actions net 80% of our results) to our daily business actions, I believe marketing must be in that 20% of high-return activities we devote our time to each day. Limiting your choices will give you more time/energy to create true, focused results in each channel rather than chaotically bouncing between too many options.

- Base your selected channels on your niche. Different channels naturally attract different tribes. If you’re marketing in channels your ideal tribe never uses… well, enough said, right? The other option if you’re already entrenched in certain channels is to change your niche to match the channels.

- Immerse yourself in your selected channels. Once you have chosen your channels, create a strategy and systems to make the most of your time in each one. Both from the standpoint of being efficient with your time and of communicating very consistently with your tribe.

- Revisit your business model. As Seth proposes in his blog post, the channels we choose really do change who we are and what we do in our business. Do your programs and services align with your marketing channels? What about the actions you take and decisions you make in business each day? Are they optimally aligned with your marketing and media channels?

Setting your fees can be tricky for both new and seasoned entrepreneurs. It brings up so many questions and fears around choosing the right price and what happens if you choose the wrong one. And the higher the stakes (or bigger the contract), the worse the doubts become.

One particular question that came up for one of my clients this week was, “What happens if I quote too high and lose the sale?” Honestly, that is a possibility. I wish I had a magic solution to make sure that never happens to you. I can offer you a few strategies to minimize the chances of hearing “no” on that important sale.

- Focus on benefits, not features. Spend 80% of your time emphasizing the results your prospect will experience from working with you and only about 20% talking about your process. Make sure you help them understand the true dollarized impact of not working with you too.

- Learn good sales conversation skills and then practice, practice, practice. Few entrepreneurs I know enjoy sales or even feel comfortable with the idea  of “selling”. While this topic could be an entire book all in itself, let me just say that it is well worth your time to learn good sales skills from someone who can teach you to sell in complete authenticity to who you are. You’ll have the tools and knowledge to have an effective sales conversation, which will significantly increase your confidence. And confidence sells!

- Survey your audience ahead of time. If you are selling to an organization, you might find out what their budget is for the services you are offering. If you are selling to individuals who may not have a specific budget in mind, you can still engage them in formal surveys or informal conversations to find out what they would be willing to pay for the benefits your service or product delivers.

- Start small if you’re new in business or launching a new product or service. I’m a big believer in charging what you’re worth, and I see far too many entrepreneurs who charge too little. Yet when you’re new in business, it’s often easier to start small. This could mean start at one price and keep raising your rates a little with each new sale. Or if you are going to be selling large-scale service packages, you can start by selling one piece of the package at a time until you’re confident that the entire package is on-target for what your audience wants and will pay for.

- Take a look at your mindset issues around money and charging for your services. If you’ve taken the necessary steps to understand what your audience wants, create services that truly meet their needs, focus on benefits, and hone your sales skills, yet you’re still feeling resistance to setting your fees, it’s time to look at the underlying mindset issues that might be holding you back from charging what you’re worth and getting it.

One recurring theme I heard from entrepreneurs last week at the Career Thought Leader conference was either… I’ve hit a plateau in terms of dollars earned/hours worked, or… my business has totally taken over my life. I guess the good news is either scenario means you’re at least reasonably successful. The bad news is neither is a fun place to be!

If this describes you and your business, here are three quick strategies I suggest addressing to help you get unstuck:

- Business Model. In either of these scenarios, I can just about guarantee you’ve outgrown your current business model. At minimum, it’s time to restructure your current service packages. If it’s been a while since you’ve reviewed your business model, it may even be time to revamp your entire business using a new model. Bonus note: I recommend revisiting your business model at least once a year (or even twice a year) to make sure it still supports your business and financial goals.

- Pricing. If you’re maxed out on hours available to work, raising your prices is an obvious strategy. Typically, you’ll wind up working with fewer clients (which translates to fewer hours if you are using a 1:1 service delivery model) while enjoying greater levels of financial return.

- Team. There are several possible ways to leverage this strategy. I highly recommend hiring support staff (whether virtual or in-person) to take over everything you don’t enjoy so you can focus on your “sweet spot” in your business. This frees up additional hours to deliver your services if you’ve hit an income/time plateau, and it also eliminates a significant level of stress if your business has taken over your life. Another way to leverage this strategy is to start working with subcontractors, joint venture partners, or affiliates. Again… greater capacity to impact your clients while lowering your personal time and energy commitment.

As business owners, we tend to fall in love with our processes and the “technical” aspects of what we do. We spent hours getting trained in the procedural know-how of our craft and often many more hours carefully setting up our processes for working with clients. So it can come as a rather disconcerting shock to realize… your prospective clients don’t care about how you do what you do!!

When it comes right down to it, everything in marketing is really about problems/pain and results. That’s what people actually care about. They’re paying for results. What’s in it for me? Will my investment pay off? Can you get rid of my problem or get me to the goal I want to achieve?

So how do you make the best of things in the face of this “cold, hard fact”?

Here are a few quick tips to get you started in the right direction:

- Become intimately familiar with your niche. When you know every detail about what keeps them up at night or what dreams fill their hearts, you will be able to easily and deeply connect with your clients. It’s especially helpful when you get to the root of a problem they are experiencing that they are willing to pay you to solve!

- When writing any sort of marketing content, spend the bulk of your time (on average a good 80%) either addressing your audience’s deepest problems/pain or the biggest results they will achieve from working with you.

- Use stories frequently in your marketing… your signature story, stories of your clients, general stories of interest that prove your point. People love stories! We can relate to stories on a much more personal level than we can to a list of facts about your process. Stories draw us in emotionally–helping us see at a heart level how we can be a part of your services–instead of simply engaging the brain in a logical argument about whether to invest with you or not. As a bonus note, even when I’m using stories to communicate in marketing, I still employ the same basic structure… pain or problem someone started with, the turning point, and the results or outcomes experienced afterward.

- Touch on your process only briefly AFTER you have established a strong and emotionally compelling case for problems/results. So you talk about how they will accomplish A, B, C, D, E, and F by working with you… and “oh by the way, we achieve that through X, Y, Z.”

I was excited when Wendy offered me the opportunity to become one of the new Invited Expert bloggers for Career Thought Leaders. Wow! I get to talk about one of my favorite topics (business development and marketing) while giving back to an industry that was such a huge (and wonderful!) part of my life for so many years.

Since I’ve been getting questions from all sides this past week about how to package and price your services, I thought that might be a great place to start for my first post. If you have questions about building or marketing your business, let me know so I can get them answered for you in future blogs.

So how do you take your expertise and turn it into something that actually makes you the kind of income you desire? Here are five quick tips to get you started:

1. Get crystal clear on your niche. What is your unique expertise? Who is the “tribe” you are passionate about serving? What problems are you solving for your tribe that they are willing to pay to have solved?

2. Develop your signature system. Start with the ultimate outcome your clients receive from working with you and create the step-by-step system you take each one through to get them to achieve that outcome.

3. Turn your signature system into a cascade of related services/products. You will want to create a variety of offerings at different price-points. This is one of the fastest ways to increase your income! Also make sure you always have an upsell or way for your clients to keep working with you beyond their initial purchase. And by starting with your signature system as a base, you can ensure your services and products are always “on brand”.

4. Get clear on the results your clients experience from working with you. Nearly every single time someone comes to me because they’re stuck trying to come up with a price for their services or they’re choking over quoting the fee to a prospect, it’s because they aren’t clear enough on the specific and tangible results the client will receive. Start by creating a list of 30 results your clients experience for each and every one of your service offerings.

5. Know your numbers. It’s not enough to just check in with what your competitors are charging for their services and slap a comparable price tag on yours. You need to know what your services are truly worth — both to you and to your clients. Go back to your list of results and assess what those results are worth to your clients based on the impact in all areas of their lives. Now look at your costs associated with your various services… overhead, cost of delivery, etc. Consider all these “numbers” when pricing your services.