Marketers and salespeople often talk about pitching, or refining their pitch, and it’s easy to wonder whether this stems from a sense of:
- Games pitch – setting out the boundaries, the marketplace, the goals, and the setting for interaction
- Pitching a tent or stall – going where your market is, to put out your wares in a ‘see it buy it’ transaction-focused way
- Vocal pitch – presenting yourself as compassionate, serious, excitable, etc, and on a level with your potential clients.
This article puts the focus on keeping it real and honouring your voice.
Pitching your Voice
Voice is all about who is talking, who they are talking to, and what message they are trying to put across.
Be You
When you work 1:1 as a practitioner rather than providing training or information products that can be digested remotely, people buy time with you. All the marketing you do will be compared to the service at the end of it and when the real you doesn’t match up to the message, people will think less of you for it even if the disparity isn’t enough to involve Trading standards.
Pitching your voice so that you communicate in an honest way will save you so much embarrassment. “You are your brand” is a well-worn truism and yet it’s surprising how many people equate this entirely to aspirational grooming and physique, even down to picking a brand colour to wear. That might help with visibility and with sticking in people’s minds, but what is your message? Does the message of your words align with the message of your entire being once they get to work with you?
‘You are your brand’ is not an instruction to aspire to be as glitzy as your imagined ideal brand, quite the opposite. Your branding, your voice and your message must stay grounded and live up, or down, to the heart and soul of you.
If that sounds terrifying then as something to work on in your CPD, humility is a wonderful antidote to shame. Humility as the opposite to traumatic perfectionism will allow you to cheerfully correct mistakes and get over yourself, with resilience and an open heart. It makes you easy to turn to, human, and welcoming to others. This is not the same as disparaging yourself. How can you ask clients to celebrate their revelations and growth if you fear people finding out that you’re just a few steps ahead on the same journey?
Be relatable
On the matter of being on roughly the same journey as your would-be clients, it can be hard to remember who you were and how you thought about the world before getting to your current state of growth, which is why it is so valuable to keep a reflective journal. If you are the kind to wake up grumpy, a method called morning pages encourages you to sit and vent everything that is wrong with the world, onto paper, before you start your day. This doesn’t just reduce the mental load, it also keeps a record of growth (or lack of it).
If you are able to tap into what really matters right now to your potential clients with compassion and rapport, then use their language, speak in their terms, and meet them where they are, just as you would in a session.
Be known
Currently, even though more and more people have heard of EFT it is still only at the edges of their awareness, and first-time clients are almost always going to make their purchasing decisions based on faith in you personally.
Although things are changing, our service is still not one that sits naturally at the front of people’s minds. By contrast, someone who has never tried another practice such as hypnotherapy might reasonably decide that’s what they need eg to stop smoking because the concept is just sitting there in general public awareness. Human nature is also to opt for what we see as the easiest and quickest solution even when the immediate reward is smaller than the alternative (a cognitive bias known as hyperbolic discounting and a proverb that’s been around since 1670 as “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”). Delayed gratification is completely irrelevant if the promised higher return is currently available.
Be careful
One marketing tactic that can backfire, particularly if your goal is to work with 1:1 clients, is to behave like a superstar, and encourage others to feel they are missing out, not good enough without your product or service, and don’t stack up next to their own inner ideal self because they lack the fastest, newest, better version of their current life or knowledge. To some extent, we all have a tendency to overestimate the value of something based on it being new. Psychology calls this bias the Appeal To Novelty Fallacy.
Catch 22: ‘Faster, Better, Newer’ rapidly becomes ‘Normal, Normal, Old’ as soon as someone has made use of a thing once or twice. It ceases to be unknown. Moreover, if you personally delight when your clients have realisations and transformations, you’ll have a hard time with aspirational types who are hooked on an external search for meaning. Even if there is some success, they may avoid looking back in appreciation at what you achieved together and may even underplay the outcome to validate continued search elsewhere. In other words, being too shiny in your marketing of personal change (rather than products) risks the client’s work feeling like a hard slog, for no social proof.
Novelty or aspirational marketing like this is all over social media as well as the back ends of website shopping carts and the back tables of conferences ‘upsells’. If you are lost and unaware how to start asking people for their attention then it can be incredibly tempting to follow this pattern, however if you do feed people’s dopamine cravings by promising a high, then you will need solid systems in place for constantly finding new buyers when it all becomes old hat to the previous ones, and generally this works best for industries where people are only going to buy once anyway (plus or minus those immediate upsells) , such as how-to courses.
Once you’re aware of these tactics you’ll see them everywhere, but in our industry that is built on holding safe space, unconditional positive regard, fostering self-acceptance, love, forgiveness and all that, marketing based on fear and insecurity is incongruous and may possibly step across into becoming immoral (Code of practice: misrepresentation A4, manipulation C10).
Be there
This means you have to get out there and personally and genuinely let people know who you are. Whatever method or methods you choose of becoming visible and available, if you do not have anyone helping you and no existing clients, then becoming known, liked, and trusted (building towards your service becoming known, liked, and trusted) will take up most of your available work hours, many more than you will initially spend in actually working with paying clients. Building your reputation in a group situation will massively speed things up, and choosing groups that host the kind of people you would like to work with is sensible, especially for people who are open to solutions but don’t think there is one.
Remember: An attitude of gratitude is more welcoming and relaxing than apostolic fervour to save the world!
Author: Cheryl White, EFT Test Manager