Not So Private, And No Longer Just Practicing

Creating a Successful Private Practice with NLP – Richard Bolstad

Section A: Setting Up An NLP Business

If NLP Is So Good, Why Aren’t I Rich?

A while ago, I wrote an article about marketing your NLP Training business. Since then, I’ve had repeated requests about how to apply the same ideas to one on one NLP consulting. In fact, it’s the most common question that new NLP Master Practitioners ask: How do I set myself up as an NLP coach, consultant or counselor, and earn enough money to live from it?

Their story often has some of the following elements. The Master Practitioner inquiring is a relatively introverted, quiet sort of person who prefers to stay at home rather than be out meeting people. Being self-employed and seeing clients appeals to them precisely because it seems to be reachable without having to interact with large groups of people in a large, impersonal organization. They also like the idea of being self-employed because it seems likely to free them from imposed schedules and from chunked down planning or record keeping.

The person in this common story has never been successfully self-employed before, but they are sure they know exactly what it takes: good intentions. So they spend their time and energy tidying up their internal expectations, and affirming that they believe in an abundant universe. They put out advertising for a few weeks, and tell themselves that if only their attitude is correct the universe will provide clients for them. They tidy up and create a perfect space to receive clients into. After that first few weeks of abundance consciousness, disillusioned, they give up and go back to working for someone else (someone who doesn’t have this belief in the inevitable abundance of the universe, but none-the-less is making money in a universe where abundance is possible); or they may even just go back to being unemployed. The only thing that hasn’t changed is their belief that what they did was “the right way” to attract clients. Sometimes they decide that another training is what they need. Off to learn yet more techniques to use even more skillfully with the clients who never came.

So why isn’t NLP working for them? They may end up blaming either NLP or themselves, but the truth is much simpler. The answer is that they simply aren’t using NLP and they aren’t releasing the potential they already have to be an extraordinary healer and change agent. They know exactly how to cure a phobia, they know a lot about how to decorate an office, and they know almost nothing about how to market a business. The basic idea of NLP is to find out which patterns highly successful people are using to achieve success in a specific way, and then to replicate those patterns. That means letting go of the certainty that you already know everything that you need to know. If you want to earn money from seeing clients, then you model people who are doing that. You wouldn’t tell people with a phobia that they just need to believe in the abundance and safety of the universe; you would show them how successful people have actually cured their phobias. That’s modeling. That’s what you could also do in relation to private practice as an NLP Practitioner. This article is about doing that.

If you think you already know how to create a private practice, and you want to reassure yourself that you are right, this may be the wrong article for you to read. If you just want to get rich, then this is definitely the wrong article, because I didn’t model getting rich. I modeled how to create a private practice doing one of the things I love most (NLP changework) and being paid for it. To illustrate each of the steps in my model, I will give examples from two specific NLP consulting/counseling businesses. These are Transformations (initially set up in Christchurch by Lynn Timpany, Bryan Royds, Margot Hamblett and myself in 1994) and the Sattwic Counselling Centre (set up in 1999 in Wellington by Damian Peters).

You’re In Business!

OK. The next thing I want to tell you is that being in private practice will require work. The kind of work that is so exciting that you can’t wait to get up and do it. Like waking up the morning after Christmas and rushing out to build something with a new set of blocks or create a new dolls house. There is a very simple reason, as Michael Gerber says, why 80% of small businesses fail within the first five years. It’s not because the people running them don’t work! It’s because they do too much of the wrong kind of work. They do the technical work they were trained to do (in our case NLP coaching and counselling) as well as all the paperwork of running a business. Gerber says a self-employed practitioner has three roles. They fit neatly with the creativity strategy Robert Dilts modelled from Walt Disney (Dilts, Epstein and Dilts, 1991). They are the Entrepreneur (dreamer), the Technician (realist) and the Manager (critic).

Most of us, Gerber points out, get into NLP counselling or coaching as doers, as technicians. During our NLP trainings, we get good at what we’re doing, and then we start to dream about being in business on our own. So we rush out into the world following our dream. The missing element, says Gerber, is the Manager. Most people think of a manager as the person in charge. But in Gerber’s terms, the manager is the person who (like Dilts’ Critic) makes sure the plans of the entrepreneur and the work of the technician actually gets to succeed. He says, “The Manager cleans up after the Entrepreneur.” (Gerber, 1995, p 26). Aware that something is lacking, a newly self-employed coach-counsellor often looks around for help, and hires someone to do all the paperwork; to tidy up after them. Unfortunately, that’s not the point. The new “office help” doesn’t know your overall values, your vision as an Entrepreneur. In the end, Gerber, suggests, they just make the gap between your dreams and the day to day realities more obvious! What’s missing is the manager in you. The decision, Gerber suggests, is whether you want to be primarily a Technician (in which case you’re better off working for someone else) or a Manager (in which case the coaching that you arrange to be done is more your product than your job). I would rephrase Gerber’s position and say that the important thing is to be clear, at any particular time, whether you are an Entrepreneur, a Technician or a Manager.

A Manager can think of their coaching as a product that is outside of and separable from them. They have the ability to step back from it and critique it, to plan it as a business, to market it, to model its success and even to package that success as a franchise. In Gerber’s terms, most of my articles about counselling and coaching are addressed to you as a Technician. This article is addressed to you as a Manager.

What is the solution for the introverted person with that “common problem” described above? Robert Hamilton and John English (1993) say that research reveals particular metaprograms and values which are associated with small business success. Here is their list. I’ve explained this list to people who then offer counter-examples. “I know someone who never set goals and is rich”. So once again, let me say; if you already know better, this may be the wrong article for you to read. On the other hand, if you identify one of these as a challenge for you, this is your opportunity to acknowledge the challenge, and either develop this skill or find someone who already has it to link in with. (Doing what I just suggest in this sentence IS actually applying several of these skills, by the way).

Drive and energy (willing to play at it for hours on end)
Self confidence (believing you’re in charge of your results)
Long term involvement (willing to keep at it for years)
Monitoring money as a method of feedback
Persistent solution finding (seeing problems as just challenges)
Goal setting (clear, specified goals)
Care about using time usefully
Moderate risk taking (willing to take a carefully calculated risk)
Dealing with unmet goals as an opportunity to learn
Using feedback to improve performance
Taking the initiative and acting on your own behalf
Using outside resources to make life easier
Tolerating uncertainty about the results of your decisions

The rest of this article will chunk down into some details about how to apply these metaprograms.

Planning Your NLP Business

There are lots of great books on setting up small counselling or coaching businesses, to guide you through the planning. (for example, check out Beigel, J. K. and Earle, R. H., 1990; Grodzki, L., 2000; and Kolt, L., 1999). They focus on marketing, which is the main subject of this article. But they also discuss some of the simple setting-up decisions you’ll want to make such as:

Are you working alone or in a group? If you’re in a group, how will decisions be made?
Are you going to be legally defined as a sole trader (sole proprietor), partnership, or company (corporation)? If you work, advertise and earn money in a group, you are legally either a partnership or a company (corporation). Companies have more legal protection, in return for more paperwork. Ask a lawyer for help with this decision. Which brings up the issue of outside professional help. You want a lawyer, a bank manager and an accountant from the start.
Where will your business be run from? The question is not whether you’ll have an office. You will. The question is whether it will be in your bedroom, in a separate room at home, or in an office building that you travel to each day. Getting it out of your bedroom is probably a high priority! Will your office and your consulting room (where you see people) be the same room? You’ll also want some way of soundproofing your consulting room or ensuring it is quiet. Sit there and pretend you are having a sensitive conversation with someone, and check how it feels. Of our two example NLP businesses, Transformations was run from rooms in private homes. Three separate consulting rooms were set up in our houses, and a waiting room space provided in two for clients who arrive while a previous client is still in session. The main Transformations office was set up in my own house, and each member of Transformations also used a room as an office (making a total of nine rooms). The Sattwic Counselling Centre is set up in an office building. Initially run from a few rooms there, it now occupies an entire floor, with a central waiting room and office, a staff room, and several consulting rooms. If you are renting an office, check where your clients will park their cars, where they can wait if they are early, and who works from the premises next door (and thus alters the first impression of your office for new clients).
Next you need to consider how to furnish your room/s. What kind of chair do you want to sit in as you do NLP processes. Can you reach a client’s hands to do anchoring from that chair? Can they sit upright and do parts integration in it? Can they relax into a trance in it?
And to run a counselling or coaching business, you’ll want more than chairs. Probably, you want a computer with a word processor, accounting system and database, connected to a laser printer. Being connected to the outside world by phone, fax and email is almost essential. The question is how you’ll manage these connections. Will you use an answer-phone, will you try and answer the phone at any time, or will you pay someone to answer it for you (an office assistant or an answering company)? And yes, Telecom will check whether you’re using your home phone as a business phone, so if you’re at home that means another decision about getting one phone line or two.
Next, you need some decisions about insurance, because your home insurance doesn’t cover all that new equipment. And how about indemnity insurance? (sometimes your national NLP Association can provide this or advise you where to get it.) Maybe you want health insurance, or other benefits that you might have taken for granted as an employed person.
Finally, there’s the issue of hiring help. If you decide to do that, you can do it in two ways; by employing people (full or part time), and by contracting help for specific tasks. Talk to someone about your responsibilities as an employer in either case; employing someone is not a decision you can randomly change your mind about next week. You’ll also want to ensure staff operate in a way that aligns with your values. This means that you as an employer need to very clear about your values (your criteria) for each task you hand over to someone else.

So how are you going? Being a Manager has a different feel about it. For one thing, the costs and risks involved are often much more concrete. The risk is not just that someone might not like your session; it’s that (for example) Inland Revenue might charge you very serious penalties if you don’t get money to them on time! The potential is not just that you might go home feeling like you did your job well; it’s that you might go home feeling that you are on track with your life mission and creating a world worth living in!

There’s one more aspect of being a manager to consider though. If no-one knows about your fantastic NLP consulting business, you don’t get to carry on playing the game. So in the next section, I want to start thinking in detail about how to build relationships with clients and bring your business alive.

Section B: Ready For Marketing

Reframing Marketing

In the last section, I talked about some of the issues involved in setting up an NLP consulting business. What we are going to discuss next is marketing this NLP business. Marketing means building relationships with people who want to benefit from the incredible gift of NLP. They already want the benefits that you can offer, for the very same reasons that you first wanted them: because those benefits will transform their lives, creating happiness and success where there was confusion, anxiety and depression. So marketing is not some serious, amoral business activity that you do in order to lure people into the “real” NLP sessions. Marketing IS the beginning of the NLP change process. Remember back to your first contact with NLP. When you first read about NLP, or heard from a friend what amazing things they had learned, you were already changing your life; you were already doing NLP.

M ission
A uthenticity
R esearch
K nocking on doors
E nthusing Clients
T hrough Care

Mission: What Makes It All Worth While?

As the Entrepreneur in you knows, though, there are some very good reasons for going into business. Getting clear about what those are in your specific case is important before we consider this “mysterious” field of Marketing. This involves asking yourself some fairly standard NLP questions about what your mission in life is, what your vision of your business future is, what your values for lifestyle and career are, and what your evidence procedure for “success” is (Bolstad & Hamblett, 1999). NLP training itself is great preparation for being in business. Being in business means you can focus your entire life on your mission, and directly create your vision of ideal lifestyle and work.

With Transformations, setting a mission involved us discussing our individual visions as a group. At a Transformations meeting in 1994, we defined our mission as ”To provide clients with highest integrity, world leading, life-transforming human change technologies.” Damian Peters says that the creation of the Sattwic counselling centre evolved directly out of his setting a mission during his Master Practitioner training, and he keeps the planning sheets from that training at his counselling premises still. He was inspired at the time by the film “Patch Adams”, which he saw on the plane on his journey to teach NLP in Beirut in 1999. The film tells of the work of an American doctor who set out to create an alternative hospital. The Sattwic centre provides alternative health care as well as NLP based counselling.

Getting clear about the reasons for going into business also involves understanding some distinctions between being in business and being employed by someone. In business, you are an independent agent, and this is an experience a bit like leaving home as a teenager. The independence is great, and the sense of personal achievement can be very affirming. With this independence comes a responsibility for things that in the past were done by your employer’s “invisible hand”. You will have great flexibility about how you plan your time, and this will be balanced by the realisation that how you plan your time directly affects what income you get. All in all, there is a feeling of ”growing up”, and “living in the real world” that can be very refreshing.

Being in business means having the courage to go for your dreams. There’s a cliche in sales that the first and most important customer you need to sell to is yourself (LeBoeuf, 1987, p 34-37). Guy Kawasaki (1991) goes even further. Kawasaki worked for Apple Computer Inc. at the time they took on the computer giant IBM. His job title was ”Software Evangelist”. Kawasaki says that the evangelical metaphor had him motivated not by “making money”, but by “making history”. And the goal was not to sell, but to “convert”. Even today, if you talk to someone who owns a Macintosh, you’ll find they didn’t just buy it, they got converted to it. The now much copied Body Shop is another example, Kawasaki says, of evangelism. The Body Shop doesn’t pay for advertising; they rely on their community projects and their political campaigns.

One thing that the evangelism metaphor emphasises is that people do not buy into your NLP sessions because they are good sessions. Why? For the same reason that people don’t buy Bibles because they’re a good textbook. They buy products because of the state that they hope the product will deliver. Another way of saying this is that it’s important to identify which business you are in. You are not in the “NLP” business. You are in something much more important. Landmark Education Inc. runs 3-5 day seminars of a similar type to NLP (Landmark Forum). B.J. Holmes, Landmark’s Director of Marketing and Communications emphasises “We are in the business of selling a product of Transformation.” (Wruck and Eastley, 1997, p 8). That’s where I place NLP too. Marketing starts when you remember what states you are selling (confidence, energy, love, transformation etc), and re-inspire yourself.

In your personal life, it can be useful to get clear exactly what success will mean for you. When someone else employs you, they decide what makes it worthwhile. Now, it’s your game. What will make it worth playing? This is a kind of values elicitation for “success”. Define exactly what success means to you in each of the following areas; the more sensory specific the better, so shift from comparative deletions (eg lots; more; less) to specific quantities (eg 2 hours a day; 15; featured on 3 major TV talk shows). Then identify the three most important indicators of success from this list or your own additions (your three highest success values).

Education level (Do you need a degree or even a doctorate to be a success?)
Money (How much is enough, not just for now but to retire on?)
Number of clients (How many do you want to be seeing per week?)
Power and Prestige (Want to influence world events? Want to be famous?)
Publications (Is there a book waiting in you?)
Control of time (How easy do you want it to be to simply take a day off?)
Time with family (How much time do you need to know for sure is free for these people?)
Speaking and Consulting requests (Want to be invited to speak, or to offer expert help?)
Community service (How much do you want to be available to help others?)

Authenticity: The One And Only You

Whether Evangelism works depends, says Kawasaki, on three types of people. First and foremost, there is the Leader (that’s you!). Your role is to believe in the vision and to embody it. If Body Shop founder Anita Roddick does not seem to be true to her own animal-testing-free, environmentally-friendly image, then the entire marketing structure of the Body Shop is at risk. Similarly, NLP practitioners who seem to glorify their own addictions, to excuse their own phobias, or to insult and humiliate clients similarly place their own marketing at risk. When people admire an NLP consultant enough to keep coming back for more, they admire not just their consulting style but their life-style. Most of us became involved with NLP because it worked in our own lives, or we saw it working in others’ lives. Evangelism keeps us true to our first intentions.

The second step to successful marketing, then, is to be clear about your vision and willing to hold on to it. This could be called integrity. Imagine two companies, both selling computer keyboards. One, making white keyboards, has 80% of the market. The other, selling black keyboards, has 20% of the market. One day, the manager at Black Keyboards Ltd has a brilliant idea. Black keyboards are not mainstream enough, she decides. She changes the company name to Grey Keyboards Ltd, and changes all their products to grey. After all, it’s more to the centre. But guess what – nobody wanted a grey keyboard! And now, her old customers, who trusted her black keyboards, can’t find her in the Yellow pages. Worse, when they see her grey keyboards, they’re not so sure they can trust them. They liked being different, and grey is a lot like white. And who knows what else has changed inside the new grey keyboards.

NLP practitioners are often tempted by the grey keyboard. Who hasn’t had people tell them that if only NLP was more mainstream, looked and sounded more like everyone else, it might work better. And it’s true that you need a certain percentage of people willing to try out a black keyboard, for it to work. But it’s also true that if NLP looked and sounded like every other system for personal change in the business, it simply wouldn’t exist.

Success, say Al Ries and Jack Trout (1986) is not always about making a copy of the mainstream product. It’s about unique “positioning”, that makes your product stand out from the mass of information that your buyers are coping with. To demonstrate the power of a unique position, they demonstrate with the success generated by being “first” in a field. What’s the biggest selling book ever published, they ask (1986, p 21). Sure; it’s the Bible. But what’s the second biggest selling book ever published? Who knows? New York is America’s biggest port. Sure, but what is America’s second biggest port? It’s actually Hampton Roads, Virginia! In these cases, as in all marketing, not many people remember anything after the “first”.

That’s why Edward de Bono (1992) says that companies which are successful do not do it by competing. They do it by being one of a kind; what he calls ”values monopolies”. Instead of being part of the rat race, they have a product which is so unique that they are in a race of their own. And then they keep creating uniqueness. De Bono calls this Sur/Petition. An example: As far as I know, no-one in New Zealand currently offers a play area for children of clients doing NLP sessions. We get lots of enquiries from people who find attending sessions a challenge because they need to have their kids minded. Whoever offers the first NLP creche will be in a race of their own. Those parents won’t be deciding between several competing providers of NLP. The first creche-organiser-and-NLP-coach will have a monopoly on meeting their values. Kevin Roberts, New Zealander and CEO of the world advertising giant Saatchi and Saatchi, calls values monopolies “Lovemarks” (as opposed to Trademarks).

One way of creating a values monopoly is by identifying your unique position in contrast to all other NLP Practitioners. This doesn’t mean fighting them; it means clarifying your position separate from them. Your background inevitably gives you unique skills for working with groups of people or types of challenge that many other NLP Practitioners are neither as familiar with nor as comfortable with. The advantage of specialising in a particular type of NLP work is that people with a particular issue will seek you out because they trust you to understand their goal or their challenge. When someone with a learning disability looks for help, it won’t always occur to them that a general “NLP Practitioner” will offer the skilled help they need. Of course, on the other hand, the disadvantage of specialising is that you could get “type-cast” as a specialist. Sometimes, I have other psychotherapists ring me up and refer clients to me for phobia cures because they have read my article on this in the counselling journal, and they assume that’s all I do. That’s nice, but I don’t see myself only as “the phobia curer”.

Examples of traditional specialisations from the field of Psychotherapy include: Career Guidance, Displaced Workers & Relocation, Geriatrics, Parenting Skills, Sex Therapy, Spirituality, Sports Psychology, Womens Issues, Grief, Chemical Dependency Recovery, Co-dependency Recovery, Eating Disorders Recovery, Post Traumatic Stress Disorders Healing, Sexual Abuse Counselling, AIDS Support, Infertile Couples, Cardiac Care, Cancer Healing Support, Anxiety Reduction, Gay and Lesbian Issues, Gender and Transgender Issues, Children, Adolescents, Couples Counselling, Divorce and Custody Issues, Marriage and Relationship Preparation, Domestic Violence Prevention, Management Coaching, Phobia Cure, Pain Reduction, Weight Control, Wellness Promotion. You can imagine many more.

Lynn Grodski (2000) is a counsellor who encourages counsellors not to specialise in particular client groups or problem areas. Instead she recommends creating a different type of values monopoly by focusing on a special type of intervention. Some NLP examples might include: Improve Decision-making Ability, Manage Difficult Emotions With Integrity, Set Clear Personal Boundaries, Have Loving Relationships, Overcome Negative Thinking, Turn Your Work Into Play, Let Go Of Old Hurts And Enjoy Your Current Life, Transform Stress Into Inspiration.

Specialisation is obvious in the example businesses I studied. Lynn Timpany has focused in recent years on the use of NLP with children, a subject she has written an article on. She specialises in the use of clean language to explore and expand peoples own unconscious metaphors, a subject she runs training on. Bryan Royds previously specialised in coaching and mentoring teachers, backed up by his providing the Teacher Effectiveness Training course. He now specialises in work with organisations. Damian Peters has specialised in the treatment of physical illnesses, especially cancer, a subject that he and I have co-written articles on. He has also developed his own version of several processes such as the NLP trauma cure which he has also written up. I specialise in creating cooperative relationships and enjoy working with relationship issues. In all these cases, our specialisation does not mean we turn away other cases, simply that we promote ourselves most of all in that area.

Confirming Who You Are

Lynn Grodzki recommends designing a very cool linguistic pattern to confirm your marketing “position”. This is a fifteen second introduction to what you do, ready for times when someone asks you, and for times when you are introducing yourself to a potential referral source. Grodzki suggests it should meet the following criteria:

No more than 3 short sentences
No jargon words or technical terms. Eg Instead of “Resource state” say “Confidence”
Use upbeat and positive language
Don’t try to say everything possible. Target one aspect of your work most of all.
Say it with passion

Grodzki gives some sample language patterns:

“My name is…. And I’m a…. (eg ”My name is Richard and I’m a coach for people who want to achieve more than average success in their job”)
“I specialise in…. I really enjoy…. (eg “I specialise in showing men and women how to create a state of total health. I really enjoy seeing the renewed sense of energy and meaning that this gives their lives”)
“I support… in their desire to…, by the means of…. (eg (“I support people with addiction problems in their desire to create a life free of drugs, by changing the unconscious and conscious way their brain responds to different choices for happiness.”)
“You know how…? Well, I…. (eg “You know how a sports coach trains someone to reach physical excellence? Well, I help people train their mind for emotional and psychological excellence.”)
“If you…, I’m the kind of consultants who can help you to…? (eg “If you’ve been in therapy before and felt that you were just going over what was wrong and not getting anywhere, I’m the kind of consultant who can help you to create a whole new way of achieving things based on discovering and building the strengths you already have.”)

Once you’ve written your statement, practice saying it with passion. Ideally, tape record it and listen to it played back. Once you’re pleased with it, USE IT! The original Transformations team and Damian Peters, who we are using as examples of NLP practices that work, both created ways of describing their vision, and used them liberally. Damian emphasises that wherever he is, he talks about NLP. He tells people that it can change their life and he illustrates with stories about what NLP has done for others he has worked with. He keeps up his contact with the internet sites at which New Zealand NLP information is shared (such as www.nlp.co.nz) and with the local Wellington NLP peer learning group. At the start of each client relationship, he gives a standard presentation about NLP and what it can achieve, preframing his work with powerful expectations of success. He has refined this presentation over the years, noting what helps people get a sense of excitement so that by the end of his current presentation, they are virtually begging him to start!

In the next section of this article we’ll think about how you get to places where you can tell people your statement. That statement is really the opening comment in a therapeutic or coaching session. As we go further into marketing, you’ll work out how to complete the session and get paid!

Section C: Marketing

Research

Okay; lets assume you have set up a business, you know your mission, and you’re committed to being true to that mission. In the next sections of this article, we’ll be thinking about how to contact other people so they can play with you. Getting people to know about your existence is the beginning of your NLP work with them, and so marketing is an intrinsic part of doing great NLP work. Most people assume that marketing is much the same as advertising, and boils down to getting out some brochures. Actually, advertising is a tiny sub-section of marketing. Marketing involves the entire relationship between you and your “market” (your past, present and future clients). This includes finding out who those people are, offering sessions that are of interest to them (rather than only of interest to you), helping them find out about and get to your practice, dealing with any situations where people weren’t happy with your work, and in other ways treating all these people as partners in your mission (Joseph, 1987, p 11-19). Making brochures and sending them out is a pretty small part of all that.

Even within the area of advertising, marketing experts (eg see Kennedy and Courtnay, 1995, p 75-79) give their three priorities the following rating:

The specific audience you want to reach =10 points
A compelling offer =5 points
Irresistible creative execution =1 point

They say that for every one hour (or $1) you spend on creative design of your advert, you would be advised to spend five hours (or $5) designing your offer (explained below), and a huge ten hours ($10) learning about your customers, and their needs and values. Here’s where the NLP Practitioner in that “common story” I described at the start of the article often misses the mark. They may put almost all their energy into creative design.

Market research is the old name for studying your potential audiences. Traditional style market research, done by you or someone you hire, can tell you such things as:

what certain people like and want,
what they have heard about your product already (if anything),
what they are willing to pay for it,
who actually makes the decisions you need to influence (eg if school students are central to your market, you may find that their School Counsellors actually control what outside counselling they are able to attend). The person who makes the decision is the person you want to market to most of all.

Apart from simply asking people these questions, research also involves observing what other people are doing in your same market. For example, what are other NLP counsellors or coaches doing that works? Do check that you are modelling actions that are successful, because not all advertising campaigns in the NLP field are working. I was impressed to see that one Hypnotherapist I knew was placing half page adverts in a national magazine every month. I almost decided to emulate his investment, but when I asked him how successful the adverts were, I discovered that he had approximately three responses a year to his thousands of dollars in advertising.

You can identify a useful market segment (type of person who might use your services) both from your own end (What clients or situations do you know most about?) and your customers end (Which customers are most likely to want the kind of services you’d offer?). To explore a market segment more fully, create in your mind an internal representation of your ”typical” desired client from that segment. Create a picture of a person who “represents” exactly the kind of person you are interested in marketing to. For example:

What sex are they?
What age are they?
What cultural identity do they have?
What kind of house or apartment do they live in?
What do they do with their time?
What do they earn?
What difficulties do they have in their life?
What is important to them?
What metaprograms do they operate with?

Once you have an internal representation of the person, you can do your own “virtual” market research….

What would motivate this person to buy from you?
What kind of sessions would they like, and what do they want from it?
How would they make the decision to come and see you, and what could get in the way of that decision?
What could you do that would assist them to get to their sessions?
What are the key benefits that your coaching or counselling could offer this person in their daily life? Benefits are advantages to the person, as described in their own words. If you start by describing a benefit in NLP jargon (like “Being able to quickly access resourceful states.” Then ask that core NLP question “What would they get through having that”?

After thinking through this, you are ready to consider what services to offer. Will you offer different pre-designed packages for your consulting? For example, you might offer:

A two hour “breakthrough session” with a set menu of values elicitation and time line therapy for any core issues identified
A half hour free-sample “goalsetting session”, after which you explain what NLP could do to help meet those goals or that goal you’ve SPECIFYed
Four one hour ”transformation sessions”, one a week, where you work on a specific problem and all the related issues to get a sense of completion with it
A two hour “mini-training session” in which you teach four new skills to help achieve more success in the area of life identified by the person

You can also think through how you could add value to your clients by providing other products or linking them into other services.

Knocking On Doors

Here’s where it gets really interesting for those of us who are introverts. The most effective way to let others know about NLP is not to have them pick up a leaflet, or even read your Facebook post, but to talk to them. And frequently, the best place to start will not be with the actual people who are going to end up seeing you, but with those who can refer these people to you: teachers who could refer students after a friend dies on a school field trip, human resource managers or small business owners who want support for overstressed employees, rest home owners looking for services to help grieving or overwhelmed elderly residents, medical practitioners looking for a referral agency to pass on anxious or depressed patients and so on. These people are referred to by Lynn Grodsky as “Practice Angels” (2000, p 108) and by Guy Kawasaki (1991) simply as “Angels”. They are one of the three key elements in Kawasaki’s model of “Evangelism” the others being you as the “Leader” and your former clients as “Evangelists”.

Laurie Kolt (1999, p 56-53) gives more detail about contacting such people. She recommends sending them a letter and a copy of your brochure (more about that later), and then phoning them up. The letter would begin by pointing out the kind of situations where such a person might find that one of their staff or clients will benefit from coaching or counselling. It would then explain that your service is available, and detail your qualifications and professional backup (eg NLP training level, membership of an NLP association, supervision/consultive support arrangements). You might offer to see people either at your office or at their own premises. You’d then ask for a chance to come and introduce yourself, explaining that you know that having met you personally will make it easier to refer to you with confidence. You might also offer to give a brief demonstration or presentation of the kind of work you do. Kolt recommends writing a large number of such letters and sending out and acting on a few each week, aiming to have them arrive mid-week for best effect.

In the phone call, your attitude will convey itself. Remember that you are not selling something that requires a purchasing decision right now, you are a colleague looking for a mutually beneficial solution to a problem this person faces from time to time. In the case of health professionals, you may also have occasion to refer clients to them from time to time. Remind yourself that you have many skills that this person doesn’t even know about, and you have many NLP skills which support your building rapport in the phone interview and the face to face interview situations. Ask clearly for a time to meet that suits them. When you go to the meeting, dress professionally, and bring brochures and business cards. Plan a presentation which gives sensory specific examples of what you can do, including such demonstrations as the pointing exercise (see appendix), or even an anchoring exercise. Ask questions about the type of situations they are likely to come across, and suggest how you could be of use to them in those cases. If you have time, teach them a little of the NLP skills they could use.

Following your visit, ensure you can send follow up information every few months to remind the people you’ve seen of your existence. They are now part of your contact list. The example businesses which I have been discussing have all used referral introduction visits like this to build their business. Early in its history, Transformations focused on arranging a presentation at medical centres in Christchurch. They demonstrated the pointing exercise, and showed the power of negative versus positive language (“Don’t think of a blue tree.”). They explained research behind NLP techniques such as the phobia cure. Lynn Timpany has done presentations at sports centres, teaching sports coaches how to use their language more effectively. Damian Peters has presented to school groups, to elderly rest home managers, and to heads of businesses near his Sattwic Counselling centre.

Also consider people that you have contact with from your previous work experience, who may be able to refer to you. That includes friends. You know their needs even more precisely. Remember again that you are simply advising them of the existence of a mutually beneficial service. Early on in the history of Transformations, a friend working at the Christchurch City Council passed our names on to the co-ordinators of counselling for council staff. The results included a large number of client referrals and an ongoing business of running stress management trainings within the council. Damian Peters had previous contacts in the prison service and in Work and Income New Zealand, who have referred him clients, training opportunities for Damian, and even helpers seeking work experience in his office.

Methods of contacting referral sources could include sending leaflets out, running open introductory talks specifically for referrers, becoming involved in professional organisations where people may refer, proposing mutual referral arrangements, hosting open days or workshops at your offices, shared lunches or breakfasts etc. It is also important to consider how you can maintain your relationship with referral sources beyond the referral; by giving them feedback about the results of referral (confidentiality needs to be clarified with both the client and the referrer for you to be able to give such information), referring your clients to them occasionally, asking how you can assist them more fully, sending out a newsletter etc.

Running A Free Introductory Talk

Transformations runs free public presentations in which we introduce both our trainings and our counselling services. At times another organisation will help advertise it for you. For example a school may permit you to run a free talk for their teachers, or a medical centre may permit you to give a (30 minute) free talk to their staff. Don’t trust them to do all the promotion though! Print a flyer as if it was your own promotion, and ask how you can help them advertise.

If you set up your own talk, you certainly need to advertise it, which means mailing out to your contact list, putting flyers up around town, and probably scoring at least some newspaper advertising. It could even mean advertising on radio (a medium that research shows will draw mainly young women) or local television (especially the cheaper costing late night / early morning slots that people watch when they have real concerns). A few years ago, one of our graduates invested over $10,000 in setting up a free talk. It was very successful, and attracted about 200 people. Unfortunately, he never circulated a contact list, so the $10,000 worth of marketing all but went “down the tube”. Adding to the misfortune, in his talk he presented lots of information about NLP and little about the benefits. Trade fairs are another place that sets up free talks. For example, there may be an annual alternative health or accelerated learning trade fair in your city. You can set up or share a stall advertising your courses, meet interested customers, and deliver a free talk to already motivated buyers. Here are the other key suggestions I’d make about running such an introduction:

Where possible, get an assistant to help set up the room, and to handle any logistic challenges. If they have experience of NLP, they can also share that as a testimonial.
Give practical experiences such as the pointing exercise, and explain the benefits of NLP rather than listing technical details.
Get a contact list!
Use NLP rapport skills as you discuss NLP and handle questions.

Here is a sample evening plan to promote NLP consulting:

a) 10 minutes: Introduce yourself briefly. Outline plan for evening. Pass around a contact list!
b) 5 minutes: Ask people to get into pairs & discuss what they want out of the evening. Explain value of goalsetting.
c) 10 minutes: Pointing Exercise.
d) 10 minutes: Discussion of benefits of NLP with examples from cases you(?)?ve worked with in private practice or in your training.
e) 20 minutes: Demonstration of collapsing anchors with one of the people present, using a person with a non-traumatic example that they congruently want to change.
f) 5 minutes: Details of times and place you can see people. Have your appointment book ready.
g) 10 minutes: Questions
h) 10 minutes: Group relaxation exercise using trance skills
i) 5 minutes: People get back into pairs to discuss what they got out of the talk and what they plan to do with what they have learned.

Enthusing Potential Clients

As you know in NLP, having an outcome is crucial. In marketing NLP too, you want outcomes. Probably you’ll set a 5 year goal in terms of clients. Then you’ll work backwards and identify your goals for this year, and then for the next month. Once you have goals, then you can get out your calendar and begin to timetable in the marketing actions you’ll take.

In order for people to come to you as clients, they need to know you exist. This is not as simple as it sounds. Probably you see a movie occasionally. Consider how much money a movie company spends getting you to know which movies are available. But how many of the movies that are on in your city right now do you know about? Do you know what time they’re showing? Whatever you do know, it’s the result of the movie companies investing millions of dollars. You probably don’t have quite that much to start marketing your NLP business. You’ll need to use your resources carefully. Jay Conrad Levinson calls this “Guerrilla Marketing”. It’s a rather unfortunate metaphor, but it conveys the sense of making do with what you have. A metaphor I like better is that of adventure tourism. The movie company has it’s advertising agency and MBAs (people with a Masters Degree in Business Administration). Think of that as being like the package tour approach to overseas travel. But an adventure trekker carries everything in their pack: they don’t have a tour bus to carry their bags, so they think carefully about what they take. This article is my Lonely Planet guide for your trip into marketing!

Whichever specific techniques you use to get information across to people, there are four core concepts you will benefit from being clear about: benefits, attention, the offer, and measurement. Before we consider specific advertising methods, in the next section, I’ll review these four core concepts.1) Benefits. Benefits are what people buy. They do not buy NLP sessions, or audiotapes; they buy the benefits they will get from those things. People don’t buy shampoo, they buy great looking hair that people compliment them about. People don’t buy breakfast cereals, they buy feeling great all day by eating something yummy at the start. To find benefits, you simply chunk up on the training, asking that age-old NLP question, “For what purpose?”. Benefits contain no jargon (eg they don’t use words like “strategies” expecting that people know what you mean, and they certainly don’t use words like “submodalities”. Ask “What’s the benefit of submodalities?”.

Identify approximately seven benefits of your sessions. Write them down. Ideally, each benefit should be described in less than 10 words, using “you” as the focus (eg instead of, “I will explain the nature of memory” say, “You will learn how to use your perfect visual memory”). Use a verb in the present injunctive form, as if telling them what to do now! (eg instead of, “You will be learning more about using your perfect visual memory” say, “Use your perfect visual memory”). Now choose the most powerful benefit you could offer. It may be one of the ones on your list, or it may be a chunk up on them. You need to choose this one key benefit because of the next core concept:

2) Attention. People pay attention to what interests them. They do not pay attention to advertising at all – unless it happens to interest them. For example, most people, research shows, open their mail while standing by the rubbish bin / garbage can. They open each letter and throw the unwanted parts out. You have about three seconds to convince them to read on before they throw away your mail. If they already know and like you, just your name will be enough to catch their attention. Otherwise, you need to think carefully about what key benefit will grab their attention. Consider using phrases that grab attention such as ”Do your students deserve…”, “At last, a process that…”, “Discover why…”, “Take a giant step…”

It’s similar in a newspaper. People do not go through a newspaper reading each advert carefully in case it contains benefits to them. They skim the parts of the newspaper they’re familiar with, looking for news (that’s what newspapers claim to contain). If you want to attract their attention, make your newspaper advert look like the news – and good news! Unless I can get editorial copy in beside our advert, I tend to use newspaper advertising simply to get the attention of people who already know NLP. So the big word in my advert is “NLP”. If I can get an article in about my work, I choose a benefit for the heading. Something like “New discovery heals phobias in minutes!” or “Study shows time saved by remembering instantly”. There’s no way I’d waste that heading by saying “The Advantages of NLP”. NLP interests you and me. But the question in advertising is what interests your customers.

When I write the word “NLP” as the heading of my advert, I am in a sense using a logo. As you set up in business, consider having a logo designed. Placing it in every advert you use will enable people to quickly and unconsciously find your advert. It also conveys non-verbally something of your intention. Our first logo at Transformations was a butterfly. It emphasises the notion of transformation. Our current logo emphasises the international nature of what we do. Each has its place, because just as there are some groups where a butterfly is a little play-school-like, there are some places where a globe is rather multinational-conglomerate-style.

This brings up another important point about attention: conscious attention is the result of cumulative unconscious awareness. After you’ve seen the same advert twice unconsciously, seeing it a third time can be enough to bring it into awareness. Thus, three small adverts in the same newspaper are worth far more than one large one that cost the same money.

3) The Offer. Once you have someone’s attention, your advertising communication moves to one clear conclusion. It may be where the person fills in a coupon and mails it to you, or where they ring you up, or where they attend your free introductory talk. This conclusion is made more motivating by the use of an offer. Attending a free evening may be an offer. Getting free information leaflets may be an offer. Getting an audiotape at half price when you book a session today may be an offer. Getting free advice about how NLP could benefit you may be an offer. The offer doesn’t have to be fancy. An example of a newspaper classified advert with a benefit, an offer, and a measurable response (see below) could be “Increase memory by 60% in 30 minutes. For free brochure on the NLP visual memory process, phone Visual Memory Services, 03-337-1852” Offers can be “tiered” so that the first offer is for a brochure, and when the brochure arrives it comes with an offer for a series of 5 sessions with a free audiotape. If you choose to tier your offer, remember that in your first advert you aim to sell the first offer, not the final product or sessions! Tell them benefits of the current offer.

4) Measurement. Advertising results can be measured, like any other NLP outcomes. This requires keeping a record of what advertising you’ve done and what results you had. Lets imagine that each new client pays $300 on average and costs you $50 in extra materials. If you put a $1000 advertisement in the newspaper, you need to get four more people as a direct result of that advert, for it to have paid for itself. If you get seven, it earned you $750. But how will you know whether someone came as a result of that advertising? The answer is to use key words or even key addresses which mark out each advert. In your newspaper advert, you might say “Call 03-337-1852 and ask for the NLP Breakthrough Sessions”, while in your posters advertising the sessions you might say instead “Phone 03-337-1235 and ask about our NLP Coaching”. By what someone says when they call, and even by which phone they call on, you can tell which advert delivered the call. Once you can measure the results of your advertising, you can even test out different versions of the same advert (eg with slightly different wording, or put on a different page of the newspaper), to see which version delivers best.

Measuring advertising costs in this way reminds you that they are an investment. I invest at least 10% of the income I expect from an NLP training course into advertising. I also invest considerable time. So I choose carefully. Your marketing plan is a part of your total business plan, so it needs to relate realistically to that (in terms of money spent and time used, for example).

In this section, I’ve gotten into the detail of creating a marketing plan. I’ve described virtual market research and the active process of knocking on doors and creating introductory sessions for potential clients and referrers of clients. I’ve discussed the core concepts guiding advertising, the detailed methods by which you can let others know that your service exists. In the next section, I’ll chunk down and discuss the choices available to you as an advertiser of NLP consulting.

Section D: Advertising Choices

Ways To Enthuse Potential Clients

In the last section of this article, we thought about marketing and advertising. I discussed how to set up introductory sessions in which you show potential clients or referrers of clients what you are offering them. I defined advertising as a small subsection of the whole process of building relationships with clients (marketing), which starts when you clarify who you are and who you want to be working with. I talked about some core concepts in advertising such as being able to utilise attention by discussing the benefits of your service to your clients (what intentions will it meet) rather than merely its objective features.

There are a great many choices of ways to make contact with people. In 2005, your initial marketing steps for your consulting business might have been as simple as

listing in the yellow pages (what predated Google)
having a business card made and preparing your 15 second verbal introduction message to say enthusiastically as you give out the business card (discussed in section B)
designing and photocopying a brochure (what predated internet sites and social media pages)
mailing the brochure out to contacts taken from the local city council directory of community services, and to friends
putting the brochure up on some noticeboards.
planning and rehearsing an introductory referral session (discussed in section C)
contacting ten organisations to arrange introductory sessions

There are some useful hints I’d like to give you about how to utilise these and other methods of telling people about your sessions. In this section, I’ll list these methods under ten headings: Business Cards, Directories, Magazines, Newspapers, Community Bulletin Boards or Newsletters, Mail, Free Samples, the Internet, Television and Sales Talk. Then I’ll move to the Internet itself (a section added after this article was first written, obviously).

Business Cards: Printing a business card, at $50 for a few hundred, is still the most sensible immediate investment in advertising that you could make. It gives you something to hand to someone when you use your fifteen second intro speech. Many people collect business cards for future reference, and you may find that someone contacts you from a card you gave out several months before. The card gives information about where to find you. It can show a photo of you to remind the person of you, three months later. It can be used to write appointments on the back. It can contain text as a sort of mini-brochure. You can put cards up in health food stores, in restaurants, on community noticeboards, and in NLP books in bookstores (ask permission first).

Directories (eg The Yellow Pages; online directories): People who are looking for your services already will look in the yellow pages or on a search engine. You don’t need to convince these people that NLP is a good idea – they already are looking for it. What they want to know is where to contact you and, if you have a display ad (the kind with more than just a name and phone number) what range of work you do. Reading the name of their challenge or goal will trigger a phonecall more than general promises. Size isn’t important in the yellow pages unless you can be the biggest on the page (a position probably held by some established business). Listings in other directories may or may not be useful. I paid extensively for a listing in a counselling directory, for five years, with no apparent results. Famously, only the first page of Google listings is useful because people mainly look down just one page.

Magazines: Magazines are available in both printed and online formats. People read magazines for specialist articles which give them in depth ideas. Adverts don’t do that. Some magazines have their own “yellow pages” or diary dates, and those are worth using. The real point of magazines is the articles. Articles give people an opportunity to explore your ideas in depth. If you write an article for a magazine, then putting an advert beside it can deliver. Some magazines will offer a deal where they publish a small article and an ad, and you pay a reduced price for the ad. From my experience it can be even better to include your brochure as an insert, but this is very expensive. Do this only when aiming at a specific geographical area, and with a magazine that goes out to lots of people who are interested in NLP style sessions (a New Age magazine is an example). Adverts that cover a quarter page or more of a wide coverage magazine are very expensive, and rarely deliver value, no matter what the magazine editors tell you. Using NLP magazines is a great idea, as long as you remember that they go out to people who already know what NLP is.

Newspapers: People read newspapers and news sites for news, so if you have space write a newspaper article-style advert, with a title, columns and newspaper style “justified” (neatly lined up left and right) typing. Remember that three small adverts costing $200 each are worth more than one larger advert costing $1000. Advertising may be cheaper in community newspapers, but think about who reads them before you use these. In newspapers, as in real estate, research shows there are three basic rules: location, location, location. The right side page is better than the left, the outer edge is better than the inner, the weekend is better than a week day, and certain pages (near the start, or the TV page, or an education supplement, for example) are better than others (say the gardening page). On the other hand, newspapers do have “remnant space” which can sometimes be purchased cheaper (a bit like stand-by travel). Check it out.

You can also write your own press releases. Remember that, to get published, they need to focus on news, not on ideas. Write the article in the style that reporters use, talking about yourself in the third person. Don’t start with an “introduction”; start in the middle of your story with a key attention getting fact. Use short simple words, and include quotes from yourself (eg “At the opening of the new crisis centre today, NLP Master Practitioner Richard Bolstad explained, “We now have methods available to resolve most psychological trauma in one session.” The centre plans to assist approximately twenty people each week.”). Type the article out double spaced, and phone the newspaper to find out who is the best reporter to send it to. Deliver it to them personally.

Bulletin Boards and Newsletters: Free advertising opportunities are available at shops, community centres and in any organisation (such as a school) that has a newsletter, in the real world or online. People looking at noticeboards are in a specific setting. A noticeboard at a university catches people when they’re thinking about learning. A noticeboard at a local shopping centre has a “local community” flavour, and people will feel better supporting something local there. A noticeboard at a bookshop attracts people who know what books are selling, so your advert can link into the latest books. A noticeboard at a health food shop attracts people thinking about their health. Similarly, if you put an advert/article in a newsletter, be aware of why people read the newsletter (to keep up on local affairs, for example). Also, offer to set out the advert on your own computer where possible (don’t assume that the organisation knows what image you want to present. Write the article as you’d write a press release – see above).

While we’re on the subject of free marketing, consider exchanging marketing for other services you can offer. Is there something you can do for an organisation in return for the opportunity to market to their contacts? Can you combine with another organisation to market together at lower cost? How could you deliver to someone else something so valuable that marketing for you in return would be a bargain? The obvious example would be to get someone to do marketing in return for attending sessions.

Mail: To use old style mail, you need a list of addresses. There are a couple of ways to keep this list. One is to buy some pages with sticky labels on from the stationery shop. You write each name and address on a label, and then take your list of addresses to a photocopier and copy off a version ready to do a mailout (leaving you with the original to photocopy again next time). The fancier way to keep a list is to get a computer and use a database such as Access. The computer will then do the printing of labels. The advantage of the computer is that you can also keep other information about each person on it – their phone number, what other sessions they’ve had, what they liked and didn’t like etc.

Mail makes a more personal appeal to people -it arrives the way their personal letters do. Research shows that the letter is the most successful format for mail adverts, for this reason. It can best be written conversationally, like a letter to a friend. Write, “Dear reader” (singular) rather than “Dear readers”. Put a day of the week in the corner where the date usually goes. Use Milton model patterns gently (eg embedded suggestions rather than confusion techniques) and always speak to the positive intentions of your reader (eg “In your search for excellence in relationships…”). If you need to go over the page, don’t finish a sentence; have the sentence carry on to the next page.

The best combination of things to send by mail is (according to research) a cover letter, a brochure, and a post paid reply card (you get a postage paid number from the Post Office, and you only have to pay for each letter actually sent back to you). The brochure can show people with a picture what they’ll get. It can list detailed benefits, and contain testimonials from people who are as near as possible to the same as the reader (don’t include New Zealand counsellors testimonials in a brochure for American managers, for example). Remember that you yourself can write a testimonial about what the benefits of NLP are. Always include your name and qualifications: people choose YOU more than they choose your methods! The brochure can include a guarantee. It can also include a reply card or application form. Brochures can be quite simple. Consider using your business card as a mini-brochure. People often keep business cards (and catalogues). They often lose brochures.

The crucial rule about all these pieces is that everything you send should include your address and phone number, and the key details. If an application form is in your brochure, check what gets cut off and mailed with it. You want the person to still have enough details so they can re-contact you, and so they can re-read and think about your services.

It’s also worth considering the appearance of your mailout. Most people expect computer designed brochures. Expensive NLP Business sessions are still advertised on cheap paper at times, but quality paper does add to your image. Research shows that even the colour of the paper does affect decisions. Black print on yellow paper is more likely to be read than any other colours. Dark blue, dark green and dove grey are the preferred colours in business. Many people feel more aligned with recycled paper, which I use for all our catalogues. When getting your brochure printed, shop around for cheap places. Remember that in printing there are three variables you’ll want to choose based on: Quality, Economy, and Speed of Delivery. You can have any two! Jay Conrad Levinson recommends you choose the first two, which means planning ahead. The other thing about appearance is layout. This is a whole field in itself (graphic design).

PS. People read the PS on letters more than the main part of the letter! They want to see what you missed out. So always have a PS on a sales letter.

Writing A Brochure or a web page advert: Here is a step by step guide to writing a simple brochure.

1. List the key benefits your sessions will have for the group of people you are writing to. Benefits are not the “features” or the NLP processes. Rather than “Use anchoring” you’re after “Feel confident in any situation.” Avoid the NLP jargon. Use words these people will understand. Avoid the words that have specific NLP meanings, such as “Strategies”.

2. Identify one key benefit for this group. This is your “Headline” How readers respond to this one benefit will decide whether they read any more of your brochure. You only have a few seconds to get their attention, so take care to rewrite this benefit…

using less than 10 words ideally
using “You” as the focus, not NLP
using a verb: “see” “discover” “enjoy” “create” etc Don’t use the present participle (…ing). Not “Set goals that will get your life moving” but “Set goals that make your life move”. Use the present tense. Not “You will sleep more comfortably” but “Sleep more comfortably”
so that it “grabs” attention. eg “Take a giant step…” “Discover…”, “Do you deserve…?” “At last, a counselling method that..” “How to….” “Here’s how to….” “At last, a way to….” “Don’t… until….” “How could you….” “The only real way to….” “Have you ever wished you could….” “Do you know the one thing that….”
using the Milton model language patterns, but softly. eg use Imbedded suggestions. The most successful newspaper ad for a self development ever published was by an unknown writer named Dale Carnegie. His headline was “How to win friends and influence people”. His text begins: John D. Rockefeller Sr. once said: “The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.”

3. Write the main text:

Continue to use the principles listed in 1. above.
Start in the middle, not with background explanations.
Use conversational language. What would you say to the person
Never insult the reader. Speak to their highest intention and create positive internal representations (eg “In your search for a life of enjoyment and relaxation…”)
List seven benefits of sessions for these people. Consider using questionnaire style (eg “What 7 things does it take to succeed?” “Six ways to create successful relationships.”
Consider telling your own story. Always use testimonials from happy clients, once you have them. The closer the people quoted are in life circumstances and geography to the readers, the more convincing.
Give examples of the situations NLP can assist with. Consider using before/after comparison (“Before doing NLP sessions, my job felt like a battlefront. Now I look forward to spending time with my staff.”)

4. Make Sure You Include:

Your Name and Qualifications (esp NLP Master Practitioner).
Times you can see people, usual session length, and location of your rooms.
Choices for session length, type and focus.
A list of your fees, or invitation to people to contact you to find out what value they can get for their investment.
Clear instructions on how to set up a session. (“Phone…” “Email now to …”).
A guarantee of satisfaction or money back. The trust it creates is well worth the tiny risk that people will misuse it.

5. Word Process The Final Brochure. Photocopying will do fine, but the material you photocopy must look professional. Consider including a picture of yourself. It adds another sensory modality. Seeing a real person is reassuring to the reader.

Use simple typefaces that are easy to read. Use two or three different type faces at most. NEVER WRITE ALL IN CAPITALS: IT’S HARDER TO READ. Similarly, avoid writing whole sections in italic.
Having a clear step by step way to read the advert wins out over “creative design”.
Unless you have lots of money, use plain one colour photocopies on a light tinted paper.
A photo is the place people will look at first after your heading. Have a title to it that sells your course. Use a simple photo, with 1-3 people and make the photo big enough so you can see what the person/people are doing.

Free Samples: The bigger the risk people take by buying a product, the more useful it can be to offer a free sample. It can be quite scary for people to spend large amounts of money simply on the trust that you’ll do what you say, especially if you’ve never done it before! But how do you give someone a free sample of your counselling or coaching? The answers include audio podcasts, and the “free introductory talk”. You can record “live-sounding” audios at home with an MP3 recorder and a laptop, or contact a recording studio (community radio station or small music recording studio) and create a professional-sound-quality product.

A free talk is a risky but enormously rewarding way to generate sampler experiences, and is described above. Each free talk we run in Christchurch immediately generates about 15 new clients.

The Internet: If you have a computer, you have an internet connection. This gives people another way of contacting you quickly and immediately (by email and social media). It also gives you the opportunity to advertise and market through the internet. Don’t email or message adverts to everyone you know the address of. This will end up getting you blocked by the people you want to connect with. The correct way to go about it is to email or message to those people from whom you have permission. Next, set up an internet site and get “search engines” like Yahoo and Google (internet directories) to link to it. To do this, choose carefully the “key words” to use in the text and page names that you use, and encourage other similar sites to link to your site. Talk to the people you have your internet connection from about it. Setting up an on-line catalogue is cheaper than printing one, and it is accessible from anywhere in the world.

Television: Preparing your own TV advert can be done for a few hundred dollars. In the early hours of the morning, you can put a 30 second advert on New Zealand national television for $50. That’s the time when someone who suffers from depression, anxiety or loneliness is most likely to be thinking about that issue and watching television for distraction. To advertise to a smaller area of the country is much less. Damian Peters used exactly this technique to promote the Sattwic Counselling Centre in the first couple of years, running ten adverts a week in Wellington at a weekly investment of $300. At first, that was a considerable portion of his weekly income, but as time went on, the effect was phenomenal. TV is the entertainment medium of our age, and it is an accessible way to reach new clients!

Sales Talk: I mentioned at the start of this article that the reason many NLP Master Practitioners find marketing challenging is that it requires some rather extraverted action. Many of the choices listed above are introvert-friendly – and I do want to remind you, as I did in the first sections, that you will want to plan how to actually talk to people. Ultimately, you probably will end up talking to most of the people even before they come for a session. Relax! It’s fine. By the time you talk to them, they’re probably friendly! I recommend Joseph O’Connor and Robin Prior’s book “Successful Selling with NLP” as an introduction to this field. O’Connor and Prior present selling as the facilitation of buying. The skills they focus on include building rapport, asking useful questions, listening to the customer, and understanding the customer’s hopes, fears, needs and preferred style of buying. This may sound obvious – after all, it’s what you learned on your Practitioner training. Remembering to use it in talking to customers is important. The underlying attitude is one of fascination with the customer, and genuine interest in how to help them. This doesn’t mean that you have to do half hour counselling sessions on the phone with people who “may someday” do paid sessions. It doesn’t mean you have to try and meet every desire of your customer. It simply means you are a consultant, clear about what you have to offer, and interested in checking whether what you offer could help them. Of course, you will check that. For example, you’ll acknowledge any objections and suggest win-win ways of resolving them (eg the expense objection may be met by time payment), and at an appropriate point you’ll ask if the customer is ready to buy now (called “closing the sale” in traditional selling).

Utilizing the Internet in NLP Marketing

I have two cautions about these next sections. Firstly, this information (added after I wrote the initial article) goes out of date very fast. Secondly, I’m not an expert on setting up internet pages. However, the more I talk to new NLP Practitioners about the internet, the more I realise we can’t afford to wait for perfection because people want to know what to do tomorrow. If you are starting out, I may have discovered some things that are important for you to know and I’m going to tell you those things really fast here. The structure of the internet is changing so rapidly that anything described here will have altered by the time you read this. However it is useful to know that you can create, promote and sell trainings and products on line for little more than the cost of your current internet connection. You can do that via the creation of a website or websites, by the use of social media sites such as Facebook, and by use of several other free internet services. Furthermore, all the instructions for each service are given on line as you go; there’s usually no need for a separate manual. There are also usually many equally good ways to do each step.

Let me tell you the risks of not knowing this. A decade ago an internet based company (two very nice guys I knew) arranged a meeting with me and offered to manage my internet site. They would set it up so that my products would be automatically sold from it. They would convert all my books and CDs into online products. They would redesign my site so that it was “optimised” for selling. The cost would be NZ$30,000 plus 10% of all my sales income from the site. Trust me, then as now, converting word documents into PDFs or eReader books takes 10-30 minutes per document. Setting up a shopping system to sell them takes an hour. You don’t have to know anything about html source code (the set of symbols and letters that the internet is written in behind the scenes) to do that, because there are many services that translate from ordinary English into html.

In the same way that people used to go to a Travel Agent to book an air flight, but now usually book online, you can now create your entire internet business by yourself. In a few days, you can purchase a domain name (a name for your site), and create a site on a popular service such as WordPress, using one of the many hosting services such as Bluehost. And, of course, it is still possible that you’d rather leave it to an expert – just check that they are really an expert on building websites, rather than an expert on selling you their “expertise” and “creative genius”. Also, even if you get someone else to set up your site, I strongly urge you to have them set it up so that you can edit the pages yourself, updating information from moment to moment and adding new services as you discover them on line. This is called a Content Management System. They will charge you more to set it up that way, but trust me, you don’t want to have to email them every time there is a typo in your site that needs correcting, a price that needs changing etc. The following are examples of the other services available only, chosen because of they are already household names and likely to be safe, user friendly, and simple to use. Being familiar names increases the chances that they will still be here in 10 years. Otherwise, when your internet designer goes out of business, or decides to “get a real job”, you may need to start again. I’ve listed the time I think it will take you to do each step and the cost. Once you’ve done a couple, they will get easier of course.

Paypal. https://www.paypal.com/

Before you start doing the stuff below, set up a free Paypal Business account and confirm one of your credit cards. You’ve probably seen that on line when you buy stuff, you are often asked to pay with a Paypal account (Paypal is a site that gets your permission to draw money from your credit card and pay it to another person for you; it’s ultra-safe). It makes it easier to buy anything else below, and also gives you a way to ask people to pay you on line, without you having to make any arrangements with credit card companies to be a credit card merchant. Then, pay your credit card bills! Your business depends on it. Time to complete on line: 1 hour. Cost Free

Google Apps for Business. http://www.google.com/intl/en/enterprise/apps/business/

Here’s how to set up your internet site all by yourself: On Google Apps, for US$58 a year you can buy a domain (that is an internet address with the name chosen by you, like www.nlp-is-really-cool.com , with your own password for using it) and set up internet pages on it, like www.nlp-is-really-cool.com/page-1-my-story.html and www.nlp-is-really-cool.com/page-2-what-i-teach.html all using the Google Apps program. For this price you can make your site as big as you like and Google will automatically set up really cool stuff on your site to help it work. The App will show you how to write what are called meta-tags for each page you produce (lists of words that someone might type into a Google search when they are trying to find your site). It will show you how to put in the connecting links between your pages so people can click on an underlined word or a picture and go to more detail about that word/picture on another page (these links are called hyperlinks). You’ll also get your Google email address and Google account for other uses. I’m using Google in this example – you’ve probably heard of them, and their stuff is built into half of the mobile phones in the world so you can run the whole thing from your phone too. There are many other choices that will work just as well, like Yahoo Small Business http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ , or WordPress http://wordpress.lexty.com/. If you find setting up the site too much, each of these services will direct you to paid design services who will take it over for you, or you can always go back to that guy who kept trying to convince you to use his services. Time to complete on line: 8 hours. Cost US$58 per year

Google Analytics. http://www.google.com/analytics/

This comes free with Google apps. Even if you set up your site with someone else, you can use Google Analytics for free (Yahoo has its own analytics system that you can use too). The analytics program has a little add-on piece of html code that you put on your internet pages. Then the analysis page shows you instant graphs telling you how many people visit your site each day, how long they each stay, what kind of computer they use, what country they live in and all sorts of other cool stuff that helps you improve what you’re doing. Time to complete on line: 2 hours. Cost Free

Google Adwords. http://www.google.com/adwords

For as little as $5 deposit you can place a short advert that appears whenever someone does a Google search and types in the phrase or words you choose. You only pay when your words actually get used (like 1 cent per time), and the program emails you when your money needs topping up from your Paypal account. Time to complete on line: 2 hours. Cost $5

Dropbox. https://www.dropbox.com/

Dropbox is a huge storage area where you can store backups of all your computer files. Then you link to it from your computers and your phone, and whatever files you put in one of those automatically gets transferred to the others and backed up on the dropbox site. Given how often computers crash, and given that you want to be able to edit your site even when you are away from home, this is a smart idea. Basic storage is free, and for US$10 a month you get a lot of storage and the ability to link to each file from your website (so that people can download specific files from your site). That’s an easy way to put free files on your site for people to download and to edit them each day from your computer or phone. There are lots of similar online storage systems. Time to complete on line: 1 hour. Cost Free or US$120 per year

Digital Product Delivery. http://getdpd.com/

A big optional extra. If you want the viewers to pay to download each file, you may decide to invest in a paid site that sets up an “online shopping cart” on your site and uses Paypal to charge people. An example is Digital Product Delivery http://getdpd.com/ Another way to do this is to join someone else’s already functioning system like Amazon. Time to complete on line: 3 hours. Cost US$120 per year

Amazon Associates. https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

Join Amazon Associates for free and set up webpages of your own design, selling anything that Amazon sells (much more than just books, trust me), using their secure shopping cart process and Paypal etc. Every time someone buys something after going through your site, you get commission. You can also sell your stuff on Amazon, again using their shopping cart system. Become part of the biggest online store in the world! Time to complete on line: 3 hours. Cost Free

Kindle Books https://kdp.amazon.com/

Send your articles and books as Word files to Amazon’s Kindle publisher to create an ebook version. The site has plenty of help to enable you to do this free. You use your ordinary Amazon sign-up data. All diagrams and photos need to match the Kindle requirements – best to have them as jpg photo files locked into a set place in your text. You need an author’s biography and a summary of the article or book. And you need a PDF or jpg image for the cover image. Find out more about Kindle publishing at https://kdp.amazon.com/ . You can edit the Kindle source files at any time, and the updated version will be on line for people to buy the very next day. Time to complete on line: 2 hours. Cost Free

Google Maps. http://maps.google.com/

Embed Google maps into your site – you find the place you want on the Google map system and then press the “Link” button and it shows you how to design the map for your internet site and copy the html instructions code onto your page (showing people where to go to get to your venue, for example by looking at the map inside your page instead of having to leave your page to search for it). Time to complete on line: 1 hour. Cost Free

YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/

YouTube lets you embed videos on your site – ie put them inside the pages so people can watch them while staying on your page (use other peoples videos, or ones you make and upload onto YouTube from your camera or phone camera, with a free YouTube Account ). Like Google maps, it lets you choose the size and frame of the video as you want it on your site and then you copy the html instructions code into your page. Set up your own YouTube account. Time to complete on line: 1 hour. Cost Free

Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/help/events

Facebook pages and events are a free way to contact people. If you haven’t already got one, get yourself a Facebook page, set up a page for your business, and set up Event pages for each training you want to run. http://www.facebook.com/help/eventstells you how to do it, and it’s all free. You can fill an entire training from a Facebook advert if you contact the right people. Just don’t assume that everyone who clicks that they are coming on Facebook really intends to come. You need to phone or email to book them on still! Consider it a mission to build a large database of friends, and keep on their “radar” not just by advertising (which kind of annoys them) but by posting stuff that interests them and builds a relationship with them – the metaphor is that they are friends, remember, not clients. Click “like” for stuff you want people to read. Time to complete on line: 1 hour. Cost Free

LinkedIn. http://www.linkedin.com

Linked In http://www.linkedin.com is the biggest business connections site on the internet, but Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ is currently the biggest site of any kind on the planet. You can join both, and also send short messages via Twitter https://twitter.com/ All together, these types of site are called social networking sites, and they have taken over many of the functions that static websites used to fulfil. They all have instructions on how to use them on line. Time to complete on line: 1 hour each. Cost Free

Software To Prepare Files For The Internet. http://www.libreoffice.org/

You can also get free software for creating Word documents like adverts and articles and then with one click converting them into PDF files that can be read on any computer or smart phone http://www.libreoffice.org/ Libre Office (formerly called Open Office) is a free choice. Time to complete on line: 1 hour. Cost Free

Web Page Design.

This section has the most contentious advice of all. People who design internet pages are going to look at your site and tell you that it’s crap (they can look at most sites and tell you that), just as people who sell vacuum cleaners are going to tell you that your old vacuum cleaner is crap. Just check out carefully what others say and do before you decide to pay them $30,000 for a better site. Here are some hints about internet page design that the experts may or may not agree with.

Your pages will have links to other people’s pages (like a link to the IANLP pages). It’s even cooler if you can get those pages to put links to your site (check carefully which page they are linking to). The more sites that link to yours, the more people will visit you. Don’t put links to other people’s pages right at the top of your page or people may click on them and leave your site before finding out how cool it is.
Choose about 150 words that you think people might type into a search engine (like Google) if they were trying to find your site or find what you sell. This list is then a list of “meta-tags” – words that are placed into a special storage space so that the search engines know when to list your site. Originally, the more accurate the meta-tags, the more people who want what you sell would visit you. In a system like WordPress, there is a special “plugin” app called an SEO to help you do this. The page title is also important for helping people find you. Every page has an internet address and, separately, a title. As I’m writing, search engines are smart enough to detect if you are trying to “hijack” this system and pull people to a page that doesn’t do what the meta-tags claim, so this is increasingly irrelevant.
Minimise the amount of time it takes for viewers to open your webpage. That means not putting fancy videos at the top of your first page, because if people have to wait 2 minutes for a video to download before they even know if they’re at the right site, many of them will leave.
Pretend you are a customer who arrives at your site and doesn’t know what they want yet. Put links to the most basic information customers might want, near the start. Also remember that about 60% of people will (after doing a Google search) arrive at a page which is not your chosen “front page”, so you need to give a hint as to who you are on every page. Make sure you have prices and contact emails or links included wherever you might want someone to contact you.
Use the same principles for writing your text as you would when writing an ordinary brochure (I’ve included those instructions below this article). Don’t waste time introducing your topics – quickly tell people what benefits they get from this at the start.
On pages that are designed to sell things, understand that people do not usually scroll down through long tracts of texts unless they have already decided this is right for them. What they see at the start of the page is what they get most of the time, especially if they view your pages on a mobile phone. Internet viewers have internet-induced ADHD. They have short attention spans.
Remember that people anywhere in the world can see your site. Explain which country you are in and plan for how to help people from other places access your services or products.
If you do hire someone else to design your site, remember that even if they are really good at that, they don’t know as much about your business as you do. You need to work out what the goals of your website are and what kind of things will appeal to the customers you aim to get.

… So now we’ve reviewed a list of choices for advertising, and you are beginning to get clear about which specific things you will do to make contact with your clients. The marketing process doesn’t end with this initial contacting however. It continues in order to ensure that both you and your clients benefit in an ongoing way from the relationship you have started. To ensure those benefits requires thinking about pricing your service, and about adding value to the relationship with your client even beyond their official NLP sessions. That’s the subject of the next section.

Section E: Making Sure Both You And Your Clients Benefit

The Right Price

To work, your NLP business needs to benefit you AND to deliver ongoing benefits to your clients. In the earlier sections of this article, I’ve discussed making contact with people both face to face, and via advertising media. Now, lets think about making sure that this contact will be mutually beneficial in an ongoing way.

To benefit you, your work needs to be both intrinsically satisfying and extrinsically profitable. Earlier in the article I discussed aligning your work with your mission and special skills, so as to create internal satisfaction. Pricing your services deserves further clarification. Firstly, let me explain the notion of a pricing plateau. When people decide whether to buy one of my audiotapes, they have in mind that they would be willing to spend up to a certain amount. This amount varies, depending on the context (for example on a Practitioner course, where the overall investment is thousands of dollars, many people don’t blink at adding $200 worth of tapes to their account. On a weekend training where the fee itself may only be $200, the same person is unlikely to buy more than $100 worth of “extras”. In either context, certain pricing ceilings operate. A person may decide that they would pay anything below $20 for an audiotape. In that setting, selling your tape for $17 rather than $19 does not increase your sales. From $15 to just under $20 is a sort of pricing “plateau”. This is why so many things are priced at $19.95. There are pricing plateaus for your sessions as well. Fifty dollars, a hundred dollars, perhaps a hundred and twenty dollars and ahundred and fifty dollars will tend to be pricing plateaus.

There is one other important implication of pricing. Ever noticed how “cheap and nasty” the items in a “Bargain Bin” shop look, compared to the same items in an upmarket department store? Pricing well below other people in your field sends a clear message that your product is “not as good”. This operates completely irrationally, and cannot be repaired by simple reassurances that “My NLP consulting is as good as the consulting that is twice the price. You may well attract some people to a cheaper session because they cannot “afford” other sessions. The risk is that if they know the alternative prices, they will consider themselves to be “bargain-bin shopping”. People do respond positively to “specials” (prices which are temporarily lowered), but permanent reductions need careful consideration. Your business is expensive to run (we’ve just been discussing all the hidden costs for you). Ask for what your service is worth! Are you as good as a traditional psychotherapist, for example. Traditional desensitisation can take six months to cure a phobia. I’ve talked to people who’ve been to a counsellor for three years and say that the problem may or may not be any better at all. They’re being charged perhaps NZ$150 an hour.

An important thing to understand about people buying your goods and courses is that people often only do a small portion of the things they actually “intend” to do. They may take away a brochure about your coaching with every “intention” to read it and come along sometime. But the brochure gets lost, or they get involved in something else and then realise they don’t have the money to do both. Helping people actually do sessions when they intend to means thinking about how to make it easier for them to act, and act now. Makes sure your brochure tells them how to arrange a session. Having an offer which makes it advantageous to act now, also gets them to put their intention into action. Another way to make purchasing easier is to expand the choices for people paying. You can offer cash payment, time payment, EFTPOS, and credit card payment. Ring up the credit card company. Their representative is only too happy to show you how, for a 4% fee, you can have people pay by credit card on mail order or by using a machine at the time.

Lynn Grodski (2000, p 159-167) talks about some of the really interesting issues that counsellors and coaches face when they set their fees. She recommends setting fees based on your planned income (how many clients you see a week multiplied by how much you charge per session is your gross income), the market expectations where you work (phone several established counsellors or coaches and enquire about their fees, to get a sense of this), the speed with which you need to get clients (a lower fee may speed up the flow of clients), and your arrangements with other practitioners who may be setting their fees in line with yours. She urges avoiding setting fees based on:

Anxiety about not being able to attract any clients. Of course, anxiety is an internal state. You can be anxious at any fee level. You can relax at any fee level.
Guilt and zero-sum beliefs. This is the idea that there is only so much money to go round, and if you charge more you are depriving someone of something. Take a moment to estimate how much those same clients are going to spend on alcohol, cigarettes and other ways of altering their state in order to cope with the challenges you could help them resolve. Remember that if you don’t pay yourself adequately, you won’t be available to help them next year. When there are only so many NLP Practitioners to go round, do you have the right to deprive them like that?
Anger. Some therapists charge more when they think the case will be hard work – responding to what Lynn Grodzki suggests is their own anger at the clients. Rather than charging “difficult” clients more, consider referring them and only working with those you want to.
Identity questions. Rather than charging based on how long you’ve been practicing or on limiting beliefs about how good you are compared to someone else, consider charging based on what benefits you actually are offering.

Grodzki also discusses the issue of raising fees. At some time, you will raise your fees to a higher level. This could be due to increased expenses, additional training, realising that you have not charged enough to keep you in business comfortably, to pay for additional training and other benefits you’ll pass on to clients, or simply because you want your clients to take the sessions more seriously. She recommends two ways to support this change:

Give a month’s advance warning of the changes.
State the change simply and give people time to respond with any frustration or concern.

You don’t need to fix that client frustration about costs, which can have two sources unrelated to the person’s actual ability to find the money. Firstly, clients do not know all your needs. They do not know how much extra work and cost is involved in running your business. Secondly, they may themselves be caught in a self-blaming cycle of self-impoverishment. It may be hard for them to accept that they themselves deserve to earn adequate money. In either case, remember that a client’s concerns about money are their concerns. You do not need to rescue them. I’ve had clients complain that my fees were too high and then found out much later that they have accepted paying a lot more for medical/psychiatric treatment for the same condition.

You may at times refer clients to someone else who offers cheaper sessions. At this point I’ve occasionally had the person who was just complaining about the unreasonable size of my fee say “Referring me to someone else is no good. I want you, because you’re the best.” Then I realise that they know that what I’m doing offers them value for the money I’m asking; they just hoped to get it cheaper. Here are some more win-win options to deal with clients’ “inability” to pay:

Having a written and non-negotiable sliding scale so that people on lower income can come at a set lower rate.
Having the person see their doctor and get an application for what in New Zealand is called a “disability allowance” to assist with the costs of their sessions.
Running a small group session
Running a shorter session (eg a half hour session plus self-paced exercise.
Discounted prepaid packages of several sessions for a set rate.
Charging a lower rate for the times of day that you notice are harder to get clients to come at anyway (eg early morning or mid-afternoon).

Through Care

Some of the most important marketing of all begins after sessions are finished! People who have been to your NLP sessions have been through a significant emotional experience with you. In hypnotherapeutic terms, they are “bonded” to you. What’s more, they are now going to do your marketing for you. Research suggests that ninety percent of your future clients will come as a result of contact with these people! They are going to reduce your long term marketing costs almost to zero. Given that, you might want to treat them as ongoing colleagues rather than “ex-clients”. If they are in business, why not buy from them where you have the choice. If they are in a similar business to you, think about how you can behave synergistically, rather than competing with them. If they are unhappy about something, pay attention to it.

One of the most significant marketing exercises you will do is to respond to complaints. Bear in mind that each angry ex-client has been found to tell about 30 other people what they’re unhappy about. No-one is perfect, and your sessions cannot provide everyone with their ideal, so if you keep coaching or counselling, eventually someone will be unhappy. Often, you will be able to immediately replace defective products or alter some action in a session. Sometimes, the best you can do is offer to give a gift as an apology. The question is not just how to minimise the chances, but how to respond. Decide now what you will give as free gifts to apologise. If they actually ask for something to compensate, give that and a little more. People who complain and have their problem solved tend to become loyal customers or “Evangelists” (see below).

There is a balance here too about how much energy you give to clients. Early on in my career, I searched for, photocopied and gave to them extensive documents whenever they asked for information. I spent hours on the phone giving free consultations to some of them. I loaned my personal books to them (and lost hundreds of dollars in books over the year). I even loaned my products to them! The thing is; this is all very well when you have 50 ex-clients, but not when you have 100 times that.

I’ve learned both the value of remaining in contact with clients, and the value of preframing the relationship so they know what to expect. There are four ways in which I keep in contact with them. Firstly, I mail follow-up information to them, send a free newsletter, and offer a regular journal with my latest articles. Secondly, I phone people up and ask how they are going and what I can do to support them in going further. Thirdly, I run trainings directed at them specifically, and based on their requests for more learning. Fourthly, within the limits of my time, I respond to requests for information and help (often by directing them to sources rather than doing the research ourselves).

Perhaps a quarter of the people who are clients become what Guy Kawasaki calls Evangelists. These are the third and final essential building block of his Evangelism system (the others, are you as the Leader, and the “Angels” who can help you by referring). There’s no-one more worthy of spending your marketing money on than evangelists. Evangelists want to promote you. Tad James calls them “True Believers”, and Jerry Wilson calls them “Champions” in his book “Word of Mouth Marketing”. They will ask you what they can do. They’ll ask you what advertising you can give them to show others. They can inspire others because others know that they are not “in it for the money”. They share your mission. They are motivated by that mission, by the desire to share their own experience with their friends, colleagues and family, and by the simple desire to be part of something worthwhile. They could, in ways that benefited them as much as you:

Provide phone references and written testimonials for you.
Assist at your free talks.
Distribute advertising for you (which you could redesign to meet their market segments).
Organise a library or other support services
Give you important feedback about how to improve what you’re doing.

True believers, evangelists, or champions are the ultimate achievement of your marketing. At this point, it’s useful to go back and review your marketing plan, to consider how you can assist more people to move through the sequence from first hearing or reading about you, to becoming a client, to becoming an evangelist. That’s the person-to-person story of marketing.

Adding Value

There are many things you can do to provide former clients with “added value” – more than they initially expected. The following list is adapted from Lynn Grodzki, 2000, p 118 and 140-142. Rather than just running your basic client sessions, you may eventually want to supplement them by providing resources such as:

Self assessment and planning checklists which clients can take away and use as reminders while they continue applying their learnings.
Recommended reading/listening/watching lists, with your comments about their value, introducing clients to NLP and related books, audio CDs and videos which could extend their skills and awareness.
Audio CDs which guide your clients through common processes, or trance induction CDs containing suggestions for resolving a specific issue or for a specific type of success. These can be recorded with an MP3 player and edited in a program such as Sonic Foundry before being recorded onto CD, all from your own computer. Or you can get someone with a sound studio to help you create them.
Ten minute monthly phone check-ins to enable them to keep on track with an NLP-friendly lifestyle.
Information about trainings which will be of benefit to them. These could include short trainings you run as well as ones run by others that you know and trust.
Workbooks or home study guides for them to achieve NLP-related goals on their own.
Contact information for other former clients who are interested in linking up to provide ongoing peer support with an NLP framework.
A frequently asked questions (FAQ) list with explanations about your NLP sessions, the background presuppositions of NLP, and how clients can maximise their own success.
A support leaflet helping clients to explain your work to others in their life.
A newsletter which incorporates elements of all the above and is sent out either by mail or email.
A website which provides elements of the above, including a forum for clients to discuss their ongoing progress.

Summary

The five sections of this article have been a long journey through some of the processes involved in setting up an NLP consulting/coaching/counselling business. I wrote this article most of all for those people trained as excellent NLP Master Practitioners and yet finding the business side of things a challenge. In the first section, I urged such people to recognise the need to go beyond both introverted “inner alignment” methods of attracting clients, and technician style over-perfecting of their NLP helping skills. Being in business calls on a specific set of skills and attitudes, all of which can be modelled. That begins with thinking through the very practical logistics of running a business; getting a consulting room and an office, and the backup support to enable you to relax about banking, accounting, your legal status and your internet connection.

At the start of the second section, I presented an overview of marketing, my main subject, as having the following steps:

M ission
A uthenticity
R esearch
K nocking on doors
E nthusing Clients
T hrough Care

These steps formed the structure of the next four sections. Setting your Mission, in NLP terms, allows you to identify what indicators will let you know that your business is successful (how many clients do you want, what kind of lifestyle will mean success to you, and so on. Selling yourself on the importance of what you are doing, and aligning your life with what you are promoting, is important. In this business, you as a person (rather than the impersonal “NLP” are both the manager and the primary “product” or “service” you sell. That is what Authenticity means in the marketing overview above. Identify what is unique about yourself, so that you can offer unique types of intervention or service to unique types of clients. Write and rehearse a 15 second introduction to what you do, that you can say to explain your work to someone who has never met you before. This one linguistic structure becomes the core of your marketing.

Not only do you want to know what is unique about you. You want to know what is unique about the type of people who will choose your services. That is Research, in a marketing context and it was part of the subject of our third section. A useful thought experiment is to do virtual market research by creating a detailed internal representation of an “example” client. What are the key benefits, described in their terms, that your business could offer them. Would they prefer a different type of “package” than the traditional therapy hour? You could 2 hour breakthrough sessions, or mini-trainings, or = hour goal-setting sessions, for example. It is important to know, however, that not all your marketing will be aimed at the people who end up being your clients. Much of it will focus on “Practice Angels” who will be able to refer people to you. These are people such as managers, doctors, school principals and also old contacts of yours in influential positions. You can write an introductory letter, phone them up and arrange a short presentation session in which you explain how their referring to your service could be mutually beneficial. You can also run open public introductory talks, where you give brief experiences and demonstrations of NLP. Have an assistant to help with logistics and give testimonial support, and make sure you get a contact list circulated.

To understand advertising, it is useful to get clear on the concepts of benefits (what people want your service for, in their own terms), attention (the fact that advertising needs to be designed to get attention in a few seconds rather than to give the whole message), an offer (arranging some immediate benefit that the person gets by contacting you), and measurement (checking whether anyone responds to your advertising investments). In the fourth section we reviewed a number of choices for advertising. These were:

Business cards, which are a cheap mini-brochure, appointment card and memory jogger
Directories, especially listing in the Yellow pages, for people already looking for your service
Magazines, where advertisements need to be backed up by articles for best effect
Newspapers, where you can have press releases published or write an advert that looks like a news article
Bulletin boards and newsletters that may provide a free venue for your business contact information in a particular local community or interest group
Mailing out personal sounding letters, and brochures. The headline of a brochure is a short present tense instruction to act. The text can use testimonials, list benefits and give examples of NLP use. Ensure you design it with clarity rather than mere creativity, and give clear instructions on contacting you.
Free samples of your work such as a demonstration an introductory talk, or a recorded CD
The internet, where you can set up a site with contact information, an online brochure, a discussion group etc
Television, where cheaper times for advertising may actually suit your intended audience
Talking (which we already covered in detail before)

In the last section, I discussed ensuring that your relationship with your clients delivers ongoing benefits to both you and them. Set your prices bearing in mind your intended income, the benefits you deliver, the market expectations, and clients’ likely pricing ceilings. Let go of anxiety, guilt, zero-sum beliefs, anger and identity doubts when determining price. Accept that at times, with adequate warning, you need to raise fees. Consider a range of solutions for clients who say they can’t afford you, including referral, a sliding scale, different rates for different times, and alternative funding support. Your clients are evangelists who will refer most of your future clients. They can give you testimonials, feedback, and assistance in promotions. Respond to their complaints with respect and tangible apologies where appropriate. And spend some time thinking about ways in which you could offer them added value from their contact with you. That might include self-paced “homework assignments”, recorded CDs and written question and answer sheets, newsletters, internet support, contact lists, recommended reading lists and even trainings.

Ultimately, being in business as an NLP coach, consultant or counsellor is exciting because it delivers you a career doing something extraordinary. In this article we discussed some aspects of that career not often explored on NLP Practitioner or Master Practitioner trainings. This included setting up your business, marketing to potential clients and designing advertising to reach them as well as supports for them after their sessions. These aspects are not mere preparation for your work as an NLP consultant. They are an integrated aspect of it. Marketing your NLP business is itself NLP change-work. It is exciting for the same reason that the sessions in your consulting room are exciting. It is the process of helping people find a life worth living.

References:

Bacon, M.S. Do it Yourself Direct Marketing, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1994
Bandler, R. and Grinder, J. The Structure of Magic, Science and behaviour Books, Palo Alto, California, 1975
Beigel, J.K. and Earle, R.H. Successful Private Practice In The 1990s, Brunner/Mazel, Bristol, Pennsylvania, 1990
Bolstad, R. RESOLVE: A New Model Of Therapy Crown House, Bancyfelin, Wales, 2002
Bolstad, R. Transforming Communication, Pearson Prentice Hall, Auckland, 2004
Congram, C.A. The AMA Handbook of Marketing For The Service Industries, American Management Association, New York, 1991
Crompton, A. Do Your Own Advertising, Random Century, London, 1991
De Bono, E. Sur/Petition, Harper Collins, London, 1992
Dilts, R.B., Epstein, T. and Dilts, R.W. Tools for Dreamers, Meta Publications, Capitola, California, 1991
Gerber, M.E. The E Myth Revisited, Harper Business, New York, 1995
Grodzki, L. Building Your Ideal Private Practice WW Norton & Co, New York, 2000
Hamilton, R. and English, J. The Small Business Book: A New Zealand Guide, Bridget Williams, Wellington, 1993
Higham, R. and Williams, S. Lloyds Bank Small Business Guide, Penguin, London, 1987
Higham, R. and Williams, S. The New Zealand Small Business Guide, Penguin, London, 1990
Joseph, D. Marketing Plus: A Practical Guide, Heinemann, Auckland, 1987
Kawasaki, G. Selling The Dream, Harper Collins, New York, 1991
Kennedy, I. And Courtnay, B. The Power of One To One, Margaret Gee, Double Bay, New South Wales, 1995
Kolt, L. How To Build A Thriving Fee-For-Service Practice Integrating the Healing Side with the Business Side of Psychotherapy Academic Press, San Diego, 1999
LeBoeuf, M. How to Win and Keep Customers, The Business Library, Melbourne, 1987
Levinson, J.C. Guerrilla Marketing, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1993
McKenna Breen Ltd “New NLP” brochure, London, 1996
NLP Comprehensive, “Once upon a time you did not know anything about NLP”, Boulder, CO, 1996
O’Connor, J. and Prior, R. Successful Selling With NLP, Harper Collins, London, 1995
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Wruck, K.H. and Eastley, M.F. “Landmark Education Corporation: Selling a Paradigm Shift” Harvard Business School Paper 9-898-081, Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, 1997

Richard Bolstad is an NLP Master Practitioner and Trainer who has worked with clients individually and as a trainer of groups since 1990. He can be contacted at PO Box 35111, Browns Bay, Auckland, New Zealand, E-mail: learn@transformations.org.nz

Appendix: The Pointing Exercise

Have the group spread out across the room and stand with feet slightly apart. Each person brings their left arm straight up in front so it’s parallel with the floor. Emphasise the importance of keeping feet in the same place throughout the exercise. “Now, keeping your feet still, turn your body to the left, pointing with the finger as far as you can turn, until it gets tight. Notice, by the point on the wall, how far round you are pointing.”
Ask everyone to turn back to the front, and have everyone close their eyes and make a picture of themselves turning again, but this time going much further. What would they be looking at if they went 30 centimetres further? Tell them to sense what it would feel like to be that much more supple, and turn that far easily. Also, what would they say to themselves if they could do that easily. Would they be surprised?
Now have them open their eyes, and physically turn again to the left. Demonstrate first, going further yourself and saying “See how far you go, using that same arm, now.” Smile!
Check how much further each person has turned. Explain the difference as due to programming the brain to achieve – the same process we have called ‘goal setting’. When people don’t achieve in life, it’s not ‘laziness’. It’s just a lack of adequate, compelling goals. When people turned the second time, they had given their unconscious mind (the part of their mind which runs their body) a set of instructions; by making pictures of their goal, feeling what that goal would feel like, and listening to you and their own internal voice talking about the goal. These “internal representations” (internal pictures, sounds and feelings) are treated by the unconscious mind as if they are real. In this course you’ll learn how to use this information to achieve more of the goals you want, particularly in your personal and professional relationships.
If someone doesn’t get the experience, reframe as follows “That’s right, it didn’t work; because you didn’t do the process the way I told you. I said to imagine what it looked, felt and sounded like to go further, and you talked to yourself inside about how this probably wouldn’t work for you….Right? And that’s probably the way you’ve been doing a lot of other things too. You’re already good at talking sceptically to yourself. If you want to get a different result in your life, then it’s worth using these exercises the way we describe them, and only do what we describe. You just did more work than you needed to. Now lets do that one more time, the new way.”