The Invisible Problem - Finding The Real Reason Why Your Groups Don't Fill Up

Alexander Technique is a difficult sell - I think we all know that. How do you sell air? How do you sell nothing? Any words you use - as I expressed in my previous blog - end up situating you with a dozen other techniques, all available at half the price of your lesson and much easier to understand. They give you a set of exercises! Our work is created out of the absence of something you didn't know was there until it was gone - how can you convince people that it is even there? Primary what? You point to their symptoms and say: "Look, you have this problem, and that problem and we can show you what causes it and help you end it all." Well, unfortunately, so say a lot of other people who have more money, better communication skills and deeper business savvy. An independent Alexander Technique teacher, all on her own, is treading water close to drowning in that talking ocean - land is still a long way off. So you need to offer something that no-one else can. You need to find the itch that they can't reach, that they don't know what to do. This is your first fundamental challenge. It doesn't take money to solve this question - a big, dumb corporation with a billion dollars can't make a street corner relationship like you can. You have a chance to be competitive, to show that you can deliver something that they are longing to have, providing you can figure out what that is. How do you do that? By knowing who you are talking to. Get Rich With The Niche [NOTE: This second half of my blog is a paid area describing practical ways to implement what is being described in a Facebook group with 47 other teachers and students. You can join anytime to be part of their discussions.] Here's an example - In Japan, BodyChance wanted to encourage people to join our teacher training. People were interested, they loved Alexander Technique and wanted to make it part of their lives. However, we wanted too much.

Four years, almost $40,000, a regular commitment, and no guarantee of any income off that investment at the end - well, you can imagine how hard that is to sell. ATA (which was our original name) had erected a huge wall, blocking most people from accessing what we had to offer. They wanted it, but we just weren't letting them get to it. At that time my business was imploding, and in danger of total collapse. I kept thinking: "How can I convince them to come?" and I didn't get anywhere with that question. Then I asked a new question: "Why don't they join?" That was when a veil was pulled from my eyes and I saw: "Because I make it too dam hard for them!" I solved that problem, and my business grew 30% in the first year of changing my offer. I stopped asking them to become a teacher, instead I offered them a two year certificate course. People could digest that. So they joined - declaring "I don't want to be a teacher, I just want to do BodyThinking and learn more about how my body works." Guess what? They joined the next one I offered. And the next one. And the next one and voilà - 8 years later they qualified! Most of them usually can't wait - they end up in full-time after one or two years. It took me several years to both figure out this problem and implement a solution. This question will not get answered in a day, a week, even a year. But it is a question to keep asking: keep investigating the true nature of your student's dilemma. That is your primary marketing task… I realised that my marketing "problem" was outside my original understanding. I had been too narrow in how I was looking. They were already convinced of my original arguments, I had won their hearts, but something else was stopping them. This will be true of people in your niche. They may agree with you, think what you do is wonderful, but still - there is another problem. Figure out what that problem is, solve it, and your business will take off. It could be a cash flow problem (got time not money), a time problem (got money not time), a person problem (unsympathetic spouse; being disloyal to a teacher; a beneficiary to convince; an invalid to care for), an identity problem (it's OK for other people to do this; I am too fat; I am too dumb), a perception problem (scared to go to a private home; is this a cult?; what will others say?) or any number of location-specific, niche-specific difficulties that your prospective students are stumbling upon. These may have little or nothing to do with their basic co-ordination issues, so going on and on about those "benefits" is simply not going to convince them to come. You already sold them on that! That's not what is stopping them! Finding new ways to say old things is only getting you more of what you already had. Remember this: most problems are not concrete, they are imagined. Fakirs spend their life demonstrating that pain is a state of mind. You can undo any "problem" by offering a perception shift, a paradigmal reframing that may or may not involve structural changes to your business. Words have power to penetrate when they precisely mesh with the listener's inner monologue. Today's simple exercise is to ask a question outside the box: what may stopping people from coming to me, even when they are convinced Alexander Technique is great? And the second critical question: how can I solve this problem for them? https://www.facebook.com/groups/ATCSProMembers/