As a coach or consultant, what you do is primarily a service based on your knowledge and experience – your intellectual property. So how do you show that to clients?
How do you demonstrate the results that you get for them?
The secret is visuals for your business.
Summary: Learning how to visually showcase your intellectual property through visuals makes it more tangible. Potential customers can easily see you have a proven process and are more likely to buy-in.
As a consultant, expert or thought leader, your business is tied to your experience and expertise – i.e. your knowledge. But how can you easily show prospects that what you have to offer is real results and not just hot air?
Visuals are the perfect medium for tangibly showcasing your knowledge.
Below, I’m going to show you how visuals for your business can improve both your service delivery and your audience response. This means you’ll not only get more buy-in, but you’ll also be able to scale and grow your business.
Get Better Conversion Rates with Visuals
Firstly, let’s look at how your audience is responding to your offer. We plot that along a spectrum.
On one end of the spectrum, we have the audience saying “no”.
We all dread putting our offer out into the world, only for no one to say yes.
You submit a proposal, you get up and pitch your services, you do a keynote presentation. And for whatever reason, people just aren’t saying “hell yes!”.
You’re not making a sale, you’re not attracting clients, and you’re not getting the response that you want from your ideal clients.
Maybe they’re scrolling past you on social media.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have an audience who is RAPT in the solution and the service that you’re offering, and they can’t wait to work with you!
That’s ideal, right? That’s the dream.
Visuals are an UNTAPPED Powerhouse
Our brains spend 50% of their processing power on visual information (Medina, 2014, Brain Rules, 2nd edn, Pear Press, Seattle).
That goes to show just how important visual information is to humans!
So, if you’re not leveraging visuals, you’re making it more difficult for your audience to understand what you offer.
How Visuals Turn Your Service Delivery into a Tangible System
Now that we know how key visuals are to capturing your audience’s attention, let’s move into translating your intellectual property into visuals.
As a consultant or coach, you have years, possibly decades of experience and knowledge to bring to the table.
You’re able to get started with a client, unpack what’s going on and create a bespoke solution.
But how do you show that?
Bespoke – Difficult to Show Your Method
At one end of the spectrum, we’re delivering our services as Bespoke.
I see many coaches and consultants who are doing almost everything Bespoke.
And it’s exhausting. They can only take a few clients at a time and they’re on the road to burnout.
This happens because we’ve got all of that knowledge locked inside our brains.
And when the client comes to us with a problem, we are creatively applying our experience, our expertise, our skills, to create a customised solution. And we make sure the client gets great results.
It’s difficult to show potential clients your way of working because it changes from client to client.
If you’re working 100% bespoke, it’s difficult to distil into a picture your way of working.
Proven System – Easy to Show Your Method
At the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got a Proven System.
A Proven System is where you have a proven step-by-step process that no matter who in your team delivers this service for your clients, they are guaranteed to get high-quality results. You’ve proven time and time again that this system works.
You’ve taken what is inside your expert brain, you’ve put it into a system, and you’ve laid it out so that everybody on the team can be trained to deliver that service to the highest possible quality.
Not only that, when you have a proven, repeatable system, that’s a lot easier to turn into visual intellectual property to show prospects how you work.
With a Proven System, we can more easily translate that into a suite of visual IP assets that show your prospects how you work and how you get results for them.
Where Does Your Business Sit?
Now it’s time to work out where your business sits in this matrix.
It will tell you a lot about where you are and what you need to improve.
First, plot where your business falls on the Service Delivery Line from Bespoke to Proven System.
Then to the same for the Audience Response line. Where are you at in terms of the response and conversion rates you’re getting with your clients? If you’re getting a 100% conversion rate, then you’re down at the RAPT end. Or are you getting a 0% conversion rate? That places you on the NO end of the spectrum.
Once you’ve got those two points on the axes, you’ll be able to join them together and see which quadrant you fit into in this matrix.
Now, you’ll be able to jump down to which quadrant your business falls into.
High Risk
If you do everything bespoke, and you’re not getting a great audience response, you’ll be in the high risk quadrant.
You’re hanging on by the skin of your teeth because if you are not attracting clients, you’re not converting those proposals into actual dollars in the bank. And when you do get them, when that rarely happens, when that does happen, you’re not delivering efficiently because it’s a very bespoke service.
You can only fulfil one or two projects at a time before you’re then scrambling for the next client.
It’s a very high-risk way of doing business.
Hidden Gem
If you have a proven system, but you haven’t quite got around to creating your visuals to enRAPT your audience, you’re a Hidden Gem.
You are potentially sitting on a goldmine!
You just need to have a way of communicating how great your system is, clearly and succinctly that will convert and have a RAPT audience.
It’s time to convert your Proven System into visuals for your business.
Bottle Neck
If everything you do is bespoke, but the audience is saying hell yes, you’ve got a bottle neck.
You’re attracting clients in, but there is a limit to how many you can take on at a time. Because each project is bespoke, it’s not streamlined or leveraged.
There are also bottlenecks within the team because you’ve still got knowledge locked inside the business owner’s brains.
That key person risk can be dangerous. What happens when you get sick? Go on holiday?
Turning your intellectual property into visuals makes everything streamlined and means you can train other people in your team to deliver the service.
Massive Impact
If you’ve got a Proven System AND your audience is RAPT, that’s what we call the zone of Massive Impact.
It’s where everyone wants to be!
Massive Impact is where you’ve got a Proven System you can deliver, you’ve got capacity, and you can provide your services with exceptional results for your clients time and time again.
And you’ve got the ability to attract your audience and your clients, because they love your work.
How to get Massive Impact in Your Business by Using Visuals
In this post, we’ve covered why you should be using more visuals in your business (because it leverages the way the human brain naturally works).
We looked at the spectrum of audience response – from No – RAPT, and discussed one way of getting more people RAPT is to use visual models.
With those foundations built, we then dived into the spectrum of service delivery – from bespoke to proven system. And what businesses look like in each of the four quadrants.
Key Takeaway: Whether you’re a Bottle Neck who is at capacity for clients or a Hidden Gem who needs more clients – visuals for your business will move you up into the zone of Massive Impact.
