150. What is Value and How to Offer it Consistently

Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg Lueck. And this is the Doing Business Like a Woman podcast where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom. One business at a. Good morning. Good morning. How are you ladies? Excited to be with you here today. So I want to just quickly let you know what we're going to be talking about today. Today's our marketing mini masterclass. I love alliteration. As you can tell, what I'm going to talk about today is something that for me was a really tough concept to understand early on in my business. But understanding it and learning it and really internalizing it has helped me so much in terms of building my business, but mostly marketing and thinking about. Oftentimes people will. Women will ask me like, how much marketing do I need to be doing? If I have a webinar, should I do 10 emails or six emails or four emails? How much value do I need to be putting out in the world? And the simple answer to that is it depends, right? It depends on a lot of different factors. But what I want to talk to you about today is how if, how to figure that out, right? How to figure out, is it 10 emails or 6 emails? Is it live videos every day or writing 3 really great posts? We don't know exactly until we try it, but if you think about this concept of value, then it will help give you a thumbnail, a place to start. So we're going to talk about today what is value and how to offer it consistently. My name is Melissa Kellogg Lueck and I'm the founder and CEO of the Avanti Business Academy for Women. And I love helping women. I am a coach for women that are overwhelmed and stressed out by marketing and feeling a lack of confidence around their marketing. So I help make marketing much simpler, easier and more effective for women in service based businesses that are trust driven. That's what I absolutely love doing and I have been doing it now for 20 years. I have a lot of experience myself as an entrepreneur and, and helping hundreds and hundreds of clients throughout the year. So that's what we're all about. And I'm on a mission to help as many women as I can, thousands and thousands of women to achieve greater freedom through entrepreneurship. The concept of value is really important in this process of marketing and putting yourself and putting your stuff out there, right? If you know me, I love definitions. So we're going to start with a definition first. I want to define value, because we hear that word thrown around a lot. What is it? What is value? You're telling me I need to create value and value creates money, but I don't even know what that means. And how do I define it? First of all, we're going to start with the dictionary definition. The dictionary definition of value is the regard that something is held to deserve the importance, worth, or usefulness of something, right? And also, value is defined as the amount of money that something is worth. If you think of that in terms of your business and the service that you're offering, it is more valuable and worth more money. The more important and worth and useful, the more useful it is to your client. What I want to really draw a distinction, and this is where I know I have gotten mixed up in the past, is around my human, my inherent value, my personal value versus my business value, right? And so as entrepreneurs, we often. And maybe it's. I imagine it's a female issue too, right? I see this in myself. I've seen this in myself. I see this in a lot of women that I talk to that we can confuse our inherent value with our business value. So you want to make sure you're keeping those separate. As a human, you are 100% inherently valuable from the day you were born, right? You are valuable. Whether you do anything or whether you do nothing, you still are 100% valuable and worthy of love. That's not what we're talking about here. But oftentimes I feel like we get it mixed up in our minds, right? What we're talking about is your business value. Your business value is determined by your clients and the amount of usefulness that your service has to them and what they're willing to pay for that usefulness, right? And for that result that you offer. As entrepreneurs, we are always involved in this exchange of value that I offer value, and my client purchases that value, right? And there, there's that exchange for I'm giving them value and they're giving me money in return. That is the basic definition of business, right? We are always in a state of learning and finding out what that exchange of value is, what is valuable to people, how we talk about it and how we help them get the result that they want, help them get what they most want. That is all that exchange for value. And then what the dollar value that they put on that, what they are willing to pay for it. And because the only constant is change, this exchange of value is something that is always fluid and it changes from time to time. Just Keep that in mind. You're not going to get the value equation figured out and it's just going to be that way for the rest of your life or the rest of the life of your business. But what you can count on is that the exchange of value and money is always happening. That is what our businesses are about. So we're always going to be discovering what is valuable to my people, what do they need, what do they want and what are they willing to pay for? And then what we are willing to receive, what is the financial value that we are willing to receive in exchange for providing that value to them? Does that make sense? So many of us get this confused and we think that if we are, we've got to offer value and if no one takes us up on it, then we are inherent, inherently not worthy or not worth what we think we're worth. And that's not true. There's a lot of different ways to troubleshoot that, but really it's all about what are your people willing to pay for and how certain are you and how are you communicating your certainty in offering that value to them? Okay, so if you are finding yourself having feelings or self defeating stories around I'm not good enough or I'm not valuable enough to be charging these prices or whatever it is, just remember that's where I see people fall off into taking their value personally. Like turning this value equation into something, something personally about you, making it mean, something personal about you and your worth. And so if you see that come up, that's something really great that a coach like me can help you with. But make sure that you're troubleshooting the business value, not your personal value, saying how can I become more valuable? But asking yourself the question, how can I get better results for my clients? How can my service be more valuable to my people? Create more value for them. We know that people will pay for what is valuable to them, what is important to them, what is useful to them, and they will pay to the degree to which they are certain of its usefulness. And so the degree of certainty that they have about your product or service is going to come from you. You first have to be certain of the result and the value that you offer and then go out and offer it to others that also agree that it's valuable. Right. This is how we can say that value equals revenue. If you want to create more revenue, you first have to create more value. Okay, so for those of us in service based, trust driven businesses like coaches, consultants, advisors, assistants, teachers, counselors, all of those kind of folks. The way that we show the value of our service to our future clients or potential clients that are interested is by offering them a sampling of that value ahead of time before they buy. And that's what marketing is basically serving your future clients. Giving them a sampling of something that is valuable to them, that will help them get the result they want to the degree that helps them understand that you are the person that can help them with their problem. And that's what I'm doing right now. So this is a great example of value, right? I am offering a, offering you a window into how I teach, how I think my style. And some of you will want to learn more and you're like this person is for me. I like the way you know their approach and I want to learn more. And you find it valuable. You're paying me with your time now basically. And some of you will say, eh, it's not for me and move on. It's not valuable to you. It's not valuable for you to spend your time with me. So for those that find it valuable, that say yes, this is valuable for me to spend my time on, the quantity of value for those that are interested then begins to stack up. Because what our clients will do is, is they will read a post or an email or watch your live on social media and they'll do more and more of that because they're interested and they find what you are doing valuable. And then that stacks up. It's like on a scale, right? Like on those old fashioned scales, it stacks up like on a scale and as that stacks more and more that scale tips into your favor and, and the client will go to the next step with you, right? So maybe they consume all of your free stuff and then you offer a low ticket webinar and they're like, oh yeah, I want more of what she's offering. I'm going to go to this webinar and, and if they go to that and they find that the value is in their favor, like they receive more value than they actually paid money for, then they will continue on and go to the next step with you, right? Because they want, the value equation always needs to be in the client's favor. They want to be receiving more value and feeling like they're getting more than what they came for. And so that's why creating value in our marketing is so important. Because especially with all the free stuff, if we can really put that value equation in the favor of the client, they are much more likely to go to the next step with us because that builds trust. It helps them to know how you think, what you do, the kind of service you provide, how you provide it, and then they want more of that and they will go to the next step with you because they feel like the value equation is in their favor. This process of creating value and creating enough value so that the client becomes willing to exchange money for it, that's the marketing, your marketing equation, right? That's the value equation. And it is an experiment, right? So for example, say you're going to host a webinar and you say, I'm going to send out four invitation emails to, to invite my people to this webinar. Is that enough? We don't know. Because first of all, you know, what is the kind of value. It's not just about spewing emails out into the ether, it's about creating value, right? But if you write for emails that are really a great example of the transformation, the change that you offer, the result that you offer, then four emails could be enough to really get people, your perfect people, jazzed up about getting more from you, wanting to be in your presence, learn more from you. So it's not just about the number of things you do or the times that you show up, or the amount of live streams that you do, or the number of posts it's about is what you are producing valuable to your best fit people? That's always the question. We want to be challenging ourselves to learn. And we don't learn that just by sitting around thinking about it. We learn that by talking to people, talking to our best fit people, asking them what is valuable to them. Anytime you get a chance to speak to someone that you know, whether it's a current client, a former client, someone that could be a client, like asking them, how can I best support you? What can I teach? What can I offer that would be really valuable to you, that would really help move the needle for you, that would help you get to your goal or your result that you want faster and easier. When we think about that, that's where our time is spent. Not tinkering with our website or making fancy graphics on social, unless that's part of the value that you offer. When we are obsessively thinking about our best fit clients and how we can serve them better and offer them greater value in the way that they want to receive it, that's when we really gain traction. That's when our marketing becomes so much more effective, so much easier, really. And we learn about what our clients Value equation is what is the value they need to receive and see and to give them that safety and comfort to buy in order to pay the price that you are wanting to charge. Does that make sense? So examples of value could be marketing value that you're putting out into the world for free, could be email, right? Email can be a super valuable way to communicate with people. And I want you to just think about, you know, we often think about when we're writing email, we're just writing to the nameless, faceless blob. But your email is being consumed by one single person at a time. Your best fit client is reading it as an individual, so you can write as an individual to her and it makes it so valuable. And speak to your email audience like you're speaking to one person at a time. So email can be value. Having events, hosting events can be a way of value. Bringing people together can be very valuable, right? Hosting coffee or inviting people for coffee chats where you get to know them and interact with them and learn something from them or offer them some great advice, right? That's valuable. Perhaps you offer gifted coaching sessions. That is value that you can offer ahead of time where people can get an opportunity to be in your presence and see how you work and how you coach and get an idea if you might be the person for them. Or a consultation can be super valuable. I love running my coaching consultations in such a way that whether we decide to work together or not, it is an incredibly valuable one hour with me. That you have a roadmap that you take with you. Whether we do it, we implement it together or not is up to you. But you always leave with a roadmap knowing exactly how to get from where you are in your business to where you want to be. And I leave you with all the steps to get there. Consultation can be super valuable if it's run that way, right? So like I was saying before, if you don't know what's valuable to your people, the best thing to do is ask them. And it can be simple. You don't have to, I don't know, create fancy surveys or if you want to, you can, but it's often just talking to people when you're out and about. And I know my mentors that run multi million dollar businesses that I'm thinking specifically of my mentor, Sandra Yancey, the founder of E Women Network. She spends the first half of the year touring all the chapters, the in person chapters in our organization and what she is doing when she goes on that tour. Yes, she's speaking and she's offering value, but she's also taking the opportunity to talk to people and hear what is going on for them. We always want to be listening to what is going on with our clients and our potential clients, what's going on in the marketplace and paying attention to what they're thinking, what they're feeling, what they most need in order to get the result that you can help them with in order to solve the problem. When we do that, the value that we offer becomes so much less mysterious. Right? Because we know what is going to be valuable to them. And then once we create that, we're so excited to offer it to them because we know it's going to be exactly what they need in order to take that next step to make that next leap in their development, in their growth. Right. Because we're always thinking about nurturing our people and helping them grow and helping them get closer to what they most want, the result, the problem solved that they most want. I hope this is helpful in understanding what is value. If you would like my eyes on your value. If you would like me to help you figure out what your value equation is, I would love to do that. And the best way to do that is to schedule a free consultation with me and I can ask you some very particular questions and really help us get a good idea of what's going on in your business, in your marketing, help troubleshoot and I can just walk through that with you and give you some really great steps and to getting to where you want to go, to achieving your goals, to bringing in the clients you want to bring in and help you to have the impact that you want to have. I would love to talk with you in particular about value and what that looks like for you in your business. You can always visit my website at melissa m e l I s s a m kellogg k e l l o g g.com forward and in the upper right hand corner of my homepage is a big book, a call button and that will take you right to my calendar. You can check out and pick a time that's most convenient for you and I would love to help give you that clarity and help you achieve your goals and get to where you want to go. All right, take care. 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