Awareness, Engagement, and Sales: The Trio That Drives Soloist Success
inspired by the work of Michelle Warner
In the world of solo practitioners, understanding and integrating Awareness, Engagement, and Sales is essential for sustaining a thriving practice. This framework, originally articulated by Michelle Warner, highlights how each component is crucial and interdependent.
Here’s my take on how these elements work together to move potential clients from initial awareness to active engagement and finally to sales, where you officially "get clients."
Awareness: Choosing Your Path
Awareness lays the foundation. It's about how people first learn about you. This can be achieved somewhere on the spectrum between:
Traffic-Based Awareness: This includes strategies like SEO, social media algorithms, and paid advertising aimed at maximizing visibility where your potential clients already gather.
Relationship-Based Awareness: This method focuses on building personal connections through networking, speaking at events, and leveraging word-of-mouth. It’s about creating a reputation that naturally encourages others to recommend you.
When first starting out, self-promotion is essential in this phase.
Engagement: Building Deeper Connections
Once people know about you, engagement helps deepen their interest and builds a relationship. Effective engagement techniques include:
Interactive Experiences: Free workshops, monthly roundtables, or office hours provide a taste of your services and the value you can offer.
Community Building: Managing a free Facebook group related to your niche allows for regular interaction, helping to cultivate a dedicated community.
Regular Communication: Sending emails to your list with valuable content and personal insights keeps your audience connected and engaged over time.
Personalized 'Tastes' of Your Work: Offering mini-consultations or sample sessions lets potential clients experience the benefits of your services firsthand.
Discovery Calls: These calls serve as a crucial bridge between engagement and sales, providing a personalized discussion about how your services can meet their specific needs.
Sales: aka “Getting Clients”
The sales stage is where all your hard work pays off. This is when you convert the interest nurtured during the awareness and engagement stages into actual commitments, officially "getting clients."
Here, the conversation shifts to if your services are the right fit for their needs, helping them to make an informed and confident decision to work with you. If you've invested in building strong awareness and engagement, the sales process becomes easier—like rolling a snowball downhill; the further it goes, the bigger and faster it gets.
You can relax about sales, knowing that the right groundwork will naturally lead to results. It’s okay to take your eyes off the prize, focus on building and nurturing an audience through awareness and engagement, and trust that the prize will still come—effortlessly and inevitably.
Integrating All Three for Success
By integrating Awareness, Engagement, and Sales effectively, you create a very simple and strategic business cycle that considers every stage of marketing and sales. Thanks again to Michelle Warner for laying out this insightful framework.