Life is Like a Box of Chocolates…Is That What You Really Want?

Were you able to achieve that very specific goal you set for yourself?  Did you make a mistake?  Was your timing off or did plain ol' bad luck kill your chance?  Was it possibly that you did not have some key piece of knowledge or support you needed?

There's a lot of truth to Forrest Gump's line, "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get." Life is unpredictable.  There are roadblocks to overcome and landmines to avoid.   We can do the work and prepare on our own or we can get help so we up our chances of achieving what it is we want to achieve.

As business owners, our prospects want that from us.  We have some expertise that's valuable to them.  They want it, not for the sake of the knowledge itself, but for the gap it enables them to fill.

Let's look at that box of chocolate as the problem we want to solve.  We want to know from an expert we trust, where is the bon-bon we want.  (Maybe you want that vanilla filling because it's our favorite.  Which one is it?)   We also want to avoid the ones we don't like. (Are you allergic to peanuts and biting into a peanut butter filled one will cause you harm?)

As the expert and online solution provider, we need to be that Whitman Sampler bottom of the box top key that tells you what's inside each chocolate.  We need to see our customers as people that have two option.  They can putz around experimenting on their own hoping to figure it out or they can find an expert to guide them.  Finding the right expert is a bigger challenge than you might expect because they need to find one they trust to get them what they need.

We work with experts wanting to make their expertise available to their customers online.  They have all this knowledge and they typically have programs they use successfully in-person or one-on-one.  They are looking for ways to reach a broader audience.  This would enable them to  increasing the impact they can make and provide them with an alternative income stream for their business.

A big issue these experts face is they know what they know too well.  They've been delivering what they know a specific way using an existing approach that works one-on-one.  That clouds their ability to see how they can deliver it for an online audience.

What I know to be a required step in taking your program online is to do market research.  The best way to do that is to talk to customers or potential prospects.  They will tell you what they want and tell you how much they'll pay.  Running a survey over a phone call or Skype call gets you up close and personal really understanding what they want.  You want to dig into what is their biggest concerns and what keeps them up at night.

If you ask them the right way, they will tell you and you then use what they tell you to formulate your offer to them.

I have worked with these experts to take the results of these over the phone surveys to build their sales letter explaining their new online course offering or program.  That includes explaining their solution in terms their target audience uses when they describe it.  This includes the pricing their survey revealed.  Yes, your customer will tell you how much they will pay if you ask them.

We offer a step-by-step program for doing this.  You can click here to learn more.  You can also contact us directly to discuss how we can work with you one-on-one.

I would like to hear about your experience doing market research to dig into customer demand and how you have successfully used that to tackle a new offering taking your expert knowledge online.

Hope this helps!