NLP Marketing

Lots of us are experimenting with selling coaching & therapy on the phone. It has the advantage that you an offer a more convenient service at a lower cost. When you look at the customer's process as he or she goes from having his/her attention attracted, to interest, to decision, to action (AIDA), though, it stinks.

The marketing benefit of offering services by phone should be immediacy. The customer gets to that point of interest and is picking up the phone even as the decision is forming itself. Anything that introduces hesitation at this point will lose you 75% of the sales you were about to make, I guarantee it.

One solution is the premium rate phone line. UK providers will sell you a line on which you can charge up to £1.50/minute. That's £90/hr, which doesn't sound bad considering you don't even have to get out of bed to earn it. I've been investigating this route (for a technical support operation I'm building) and on closer inspection, it's not really very attractive. First, regulations limit each call to a maximum of 20 minutes. Second, and here's the killer, the phone company takes up to 50% of the revenue.

But don't despair just yet. Ether is a new service that looks custom designed for phone coaching. It has a simple web front end in which both buyer and seller create accounts. It then times the calls and provides a sensible set of call management functions. And Ether charge a more-reasonable 15% of the selling price.

Ether is a US company that claims international reach. I had trouble making out from their website just how real and practical this is for those of us in Europe. However, if they don't get their European service up to the same standard of convenience as their US service, you can be sure that there are dozens of European entrepreneurs already working on clones of the service.

I'd recommend that you take a look at Ether now. If it's not yet for you, add their blog to your news reader, and make a mental note to look out for developments in the paid-phone-call field.