We will start this lecture with a fun, little exercise. Try to remember if you’ve ever been in this situation before, or imagine, if this has never happened to you, that you just adopted a dog or a cat. You got them from the shelter, and you brought the animal home, but now the newest member of your family is hiding behind the couch, or under a bed, scared for its life, and you are wondering if it was a good decision to adopt them in the first place.
If we ask the general population what sense they believe is the most important when making purchasing decisions, they will say that their visual sense is by far the most important, and they would say the same if asked what sense they think most marketers and advertisers are targeting in their clients.
In coaching, our primary reason for doing what we do is our desire to help others. Yes, we do it to make money too, and who can say no to that? But, ideally, we do it in order to help others. We do it because we love to help other people. It is much the same when we do sales.
Yes, we are all consumers. Whether we buy a pound of apples, a gallon of water, or milk, a car, a cell phone, a computer, a house, a pair of pants, shoes, etc, shopping either in person or online, is a huge part of our everyday life. Every day we are exposed to hundreds of messages from different companies, marketers and advertisers, enticing us to buy even more, each of them wanting us to buy their products and not their competitors’.
In the Phone Prospecting blog entry, we talked about different techniques on how to do phone prospecting efficiently and effectively and how to leave compelling voice messages which will prompt people to call us back. So, what can we do when a prospect answers the phone and gives us answers like “I’m not interested”, ““I don’t have time right now”, or “we’ve been with your competitor for many years and they do a great job for us, we are happy.”
In general, any business can start as a sole proprietorship or a partnership (especially in the life coaching or similar fields) and it can stay like this unless your business needs change and you decide to choose another legal structure.
Think of a partnership like a business marriage because when 2 or more people form a partnership, they are essentially married from a business standpoint. In other words, when two or more people engage in business activity, and they have not filed papers with the state to become a corporation or an LLC by default the business is considered a partnership.
Before the formation of LLCs came along, the only way for the owners of a business to have limited personal liability, was to form a corporation. The problem was that not many entrepreneurs wanted the hassle and expense of incorporating, not to mention the complexity of dealing with corporate taxation.
When we hear the word “corporation”, most of us imagine this massive industrial empire the size of a nation, much more often more than we imagine a small business. The truth is that corporations don’t have to be big at all and in fact, most of them are not.
