How to do I further value-add my prospects apart from stories and stories?

Stories are to emphasize success and frame the direction of a client’s decisions. I cover advanced metaphor and story telling in our NLP master practitioner program (nested loops, isomorphic metaphor, etc).

What you might be missing is feedback.

In other words, what do you know of this person’s needs? How deeply do you know this person? What trouble are they in? What dreams do they have?

The old adage is to do unto others what you would like others do unto you.

Instead, find out what your prospects need and then give it to them.

Now, sometimes, prospects need more than what you can provide for free. For example, you could offer them a PDF file with tips, but not really have the skills to coach them to apply those tips. After all, that will take some time. You could spend 5 minutes talking through a solution, but may not be able to guide them because this may take an hour or more.

This is why I am clear that whenever I build a relationship, my job is to know what the other person wants and provide an answer to the question: can I really help?

If I cannot help, and it makes sense to get help from elsewhere, it would be pertinent to make your prospect aware of what you can and cannot provide. But if you can provide it, this is the basis of an exchange. They value something you can provide because there is a need of value. You provide value because you can think of what they need and search for opportunities to fulfill those needs.

Sometimes, this means you need to match the things they need with the things they are willing to pay for. An example would be that they need advice, but they won’t pay for advice. They will only pay for a product. This why the classic model of financial advisory exists. However, today, the reverse is true in many cases. Some people will not buy a product but would buy time with a coach because the coach is deemed more valuable.

If you can effectively seek to fulfill a person’s needs, you are likely to be a far more powerful service provider in any field. It takes quite a fair bit of effort to do this, by the way. And it can be tedious. But there is always a price to pay if you are serious about pursuing any relationship. As I like to say, it is tedious, but not mysterious. Just requires some good, hard work to walk a mile in their shoes and give them what they need (not necessarily what they want).