Services or Products, Products or Services or Services and Products?!?
Posted on August 8, 2008
Filed Under Business |
My initial business was a life coaching practice where I got a taste of being in the service business. There were many shortfalls to selling coaching services. To start out with - people hadn’t heard of coaching, second – people had a real hard time seeing the value of coaching and therefore a reason why they should pay for it, and lastly – you are selling yourself…a person’s decision to use or not use your coaching services is solely base on their like or dislike of who you are.
I grew my individual coaching practice into a coaching agency for a variety of reasons but the top three reasons are the ones listed above. My reasoning was that I would build an organization and system that was going to be the answers to the most difficult aspects of selling coaching services. My business partner (at the time) put me out of business before I could really test out my theories and methods. However, I did walk away from the coaching agency thinking that selling services was probably not the best way to go.
Products, I thought, had to be an easier and better way to build a business. Not just any types of products though – the kind that was low cost to purchase, impulsive buys, easy to purchase online and that also required some sort of renewal since that creates a solid cash flow through recurring income.
The other reason I was in the mood to test selling a product was to minimize the actual direct and constant interaction with each customer. It’s one thing to provide customer service when needed and a whole other thing to provide a service with constant interaction with all your clients.
With that in mind, I built in those features into WhyGoSolo with the membership cards. I ran into a few issues with this plan and approach as well, to include the partner responsible for the production of the membership cards leaving.
Sooooo…with the new business and concept we’re launching in less than two weeks, I’ve tweaked things again.
The one thing that’s for sure in this though is this – whether or not you’re selling a product or service or a mixture of both you must first have a market to sell it to and interest in your offerings from that market.
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