Are you looking to assist or help your client? There is a clear difference between assisting versus helping. In this episode, Alex Mandossian shares the distinction between assisting and helping clients and why it makes all the difference. He dives into client support and being ruthlessly compassionate, why it is all about assisting them and not helping them. Lastly, learn the importance of inter-dependent clients and why you would want them for a lifetime.
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Assisting vs. Helping Clients
This is a show devoted to coaches, consultants and other service professionals who want to get more premium clients. Those are high-end clients or higher-paying clients but don’t enjoy the selling process. Is that you? We believe that seeding through storytelling is the new selling. No matter what you believe, nothing happens in your business until something is sold. Wouldn’t you agree? It doesn’t matter what business you’re in.
If you hate to sell, then this show was designed specifically for you. After you read a few episodes, you’ll find out that selling can be fun as long as you know what to say when to say it and how to say it. If that’s the way you’ve been looking for, then you’re definitely in the right place because this show teaches you how to sell by not just handling, but obliterating the objections that typically lead to personal sales rejection.
If that sounds interesting to you, then all you need to do is lean forward and read carefully. Although ethical influence is central to our discussions, you and I will also explore other fascinating and what I believe to be very important topics such as growing your relationship capital, branding strategies, finding great joint venture partners, team-building, outsourcing principles, client acquisition tactics, repurposing strategies, million-dollar habits, even ninja marketing tips just to name a few.
Three Key Insights
In this episode, you’ll learn three key insights, which I believe are critical to make you a highly skilled ethical influencer. The keyword there being ethical. You’ll discover number one, why the key to knowing the distinction of helping versus assisting your clients makes all the difference. Number two, why client support is all about assisting them and not helping them. It’s about ruthless compassion and that is not an oxymoron. Number three, you’ll learn why you want interdependent clients for a lifetime.
You don’t want them to be independent or dependent or even co-dependent. This episode could have a significant impact on how you can win the hearts of others with total and absolute certainty. If English is your second language, half of our audience are outside of North America. I hope you read this and all the other episodes, not once, not twice but three times because nothing can empower the literacy, even the fluency of learning a new language than learning the art and science of ethical influence.
The Story Of Assisting And Not Helping
It is 2004 and there I am in a bedroom, converted into my office in Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco. It’s the first home I ever bought in that area. I’m just completing a teleseminar and my daughter Brianna is taking a bath. She’s just over a year old and I can hear her splashing. I guess the rubber duckies, soap and water is all over the place, but she’s having a good time.
Unlike many kids, she loved taking baths. This particular evening it was my responsibility to dry her off and put her to bed. I concluded the teleseminar. I walked over to the bathroom and there she was. The bathtub is a traditional bathtub where there are three sides against a wall and one side of porcelain rises above the floor about 1.5 feet. There’s my daughter and she’s ready to get out of the bathtub.
She’s a prune. Kids get prunes because they’d been in the water for a long time. She’s ready to leave and she puts up her arms as if to say, “Daddy, help me out.” At this moment, I don’t know if I was overthinking it or not but I thought to myself, “I could help her, but if I help her and I plop her out, she won’t know how to get out. If I assist her and she’s interdependent, not dependent on me or codependent on me, then maybe she’ll be more independent in the future.”
[bctt tweet=”Seeding through storytelling is the new selling.” username=”AlexMandossian”]
I’ve been criticized for overthinking things, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt. Rather than picking her up and putting her on the other side, I simply put out my hand and motioning her to grab it and step over the threshold or that porcelain of the bathroom. She looked at me weird and she said, “What are you doing?” She couldn’t speak at the time, but that’s what it looked like. She was thinking.
She grabbed my hand. She banged her knee and then the heel of her other foot and she starts crying as if I’m torturing her. My former wife comes running in and saying, “What’s going on?” I said, “I don’t know. It didn’t look like it hurt that much.” I dried Brianna off, put her to bed and then I went to bed. Fast forward two days once again, I’m just concluding a teleseminar ant there is Brianna in the bathtub again.
I go over and now it’s my turn again to dry her off and put her to bed. She puts up her arms and I put out my hand. She looks at me and her eyebrows go down like, “You mean daddy.” I’m thinking, “Please just grab my hand honey.” She grabbed my hand and this time, she didn’t bang her knee, but she did graze the heel of her left foot. She starts crying and ranting as if I’m beating her.
My former wife comes running in again and says, “What’s going on?” I said, “I don’t know. I didn’t do anything.” I dry off Briana and I put her to bed. Fast forward two more days. There she is taking a bath. This time I was with her the whole time playing with her rubber duckies and watching the soap go all over the place. If you’re a parent, you know exactly what I’m saying. There was no teleseminar. I think it was the weekend and she was ready to get dried off.
This time she expected me to put out my hand because I’d already done it two times before. She had a pretty good memory unlike most kids that age. She grabbed onto my hand with her little fingers and she very carefully stepped over the porcelain without banging her knees or heels or anything. I dried her off. What’s the moral of this story? Because it’s a true story. I believe there is a difference between assisting and helping.
There are many thought leaders in the world that talk about helping as if it is assisting or guiding. I don’t begrudge them for saying that, but there is a difference between the two. Even though it may sound like it’s semantics, with helping clients, you get them to be dependent on you, even codependent on you. In assisting a client, they become interdependent.
I’ll go over the four pendency mindsets. It’s very important for you to understand that if you’re going to attract high-end clients, the key is not for you to be more successful than them. I know many coaches and consultants who are not as wealthy, not as successful as their clients. In fact, my high-end clients have $100,000 or more. They are more successful than me, measured by personal wealth and riches.
The Four Pendency Mindsets
It’s not that that makes me a good coach or consultant. It’s my focus on interdependency, which brings me to the four pendencies. If you don’t know what a pendency is, if you look it up, it’s a noun. It’s the state, condition or a period of being pending or awaiting settlement. In other words, what type of relationship are you espousing with your clients, even your prospects? I believe there are
Assisting Versus Helping Clients: No matter what you believe, nothing happens in your business until something is sold.
There’s dependency and that’s where it’s contingent or determined by you on 100% of where they’re going. You’re commanding and controlling. You’re not engaging and enrolling. It could be financial, emotional or any other type of support, but the client is unable to complete what they’re going to do without you being there every step of the way. I don’t believe in dependency.
There’s codependency. Codependency is characterized by excessive emotional or psychological reliance on a partner. It’s someone who requires support. Many times, in addictions or some type of illness where you have someone dependent, someone who may be is an addict of some kind. It’s commonly tossed around with alcoholism and families.
The person who’s codependent is seeking the unspoken support of how to feel and how to think by their dependent partner or friend. Codependency masquerades as interdependency, but it’s worse than dependency. Independency is someone who’s independent. I have an independent client.
You want them to become independent of you when you’re done. Maybe like a psychotherapist, a coach or a consultant, but while they’re with you, if they’re too independent, then they won’t be open to the objectivity that you bring them, which is your goal because they don’t have objectivity. That eleven-letter word.
Transactional Versus Relational Client Relationships
The goal is to be interdependent. Interdependent is where two or more people mutually support each other. That’s what I did with Brianna. I want to talk for a moment about transactional versus relational client relationships. My good friend Joe Polish runs the Genius Network. It’s $25,000 and even $100,000 mastermind.
He’s been a friend of mine for many years. He talks about transactional versus relational clients as does Dan Sullivan, who was a coach for three years of mine with Strategic Coach. You can check it out at StrategicCoach.com. Transactional is about dependent, codependent and independent clients.
Those three I don’t believe are healthy to enhance and amplify lifetime value. Relational is interdependent, which means that you are mutually dependent on each other until it’s time to move on. It’s like graduating from high school, college or getting a degree. There’s an interdependency between the curriculum you’re learning and the certification that you get.
[bctt tweet=”Caring is the ultimate competitive advantage in starting and maintaining any business.” username=”AlexMandossian”]
How does this translate into client support? I believe the only client support that assists clients versus helps clients are the transparent one. The best way to do that is to create a Facebook group. Not to do it privately through email or an email ticketing system like I used to have, but transparently through Facebook. You can check ours out at MarketingOnlineSupport.com. It’s for our clients and paid students to learn.
Mentors are also there supporting them, but many times the clients and students are supporting each other. That is a paid platform. Unless you’re a paid student or client of mine, you won’t be accepted in. That’s something that you can do in your coaching, consulting or service. The Alexism for this episode is, caring is the ultimate competitive advantage in starting and maintaining any business. When I say caring, I want you to be aware of over care. It leads to dependency and codependency.
Not caring is independency. Interdependence is what I believe to be ethical and authentic caring for someone else. When you assist someone that’s relevant in any type of human relationship, whether it’s in sales, client care, with your spouse, kids, parents if they’re living, friends, colleagues, boss. Think of assistance versus help in the context of the Brianna Mandossian bathtub story. My son, Gabriel, is the same thing. He is interdependent on me.
Let’s have a quick review of the insights you and I both rediscovered in this 54th episode. I want you to apply these. Number one, you learn the key to knowing the distinction between helping and assisting. Number two, you’ll learn that client support is about assisting. I believe doing it with ruthless compassion. That compassion has three words in it. Compass for direction. Passion for having heart and ion, which is a very decisive, smallest substance that we are aware of.
Ionic is very decisive. It’s not positive or negative. It’s a direction that it’s going. You can look it up on Wikipedia if you’re not familiar with it. It’s a great word. His holiness, the Dalai Lama, who’s I’ve shared the stage with before. Ruthless compassion is not an oxymoron. It’s not to manipulate. It’s not to be mean, but to be ruthlessly compassionate. Some people call it tough love. Third, you learn why you only want interdependent clients for a lifetime. It’ll make your life a lot easier.
These insights will only work for you if you work them. Make sure you execute. Execution is why CEOs get fired if they don’t execute. Please execute what you’ve learned in this episode, because if you do, I believe your future will be bigger, brighter and most importantly, it will be created on your terms. Speaking of reviews, if you’ve already given me a review on iTunes, then please write down your biggest takeaway or a-ha moment on an index card and keep it.
If you have not given me a review of review on iTunes, then please go to AllSellingAside.com/iTunes. Write in your biggest a-ha or takeaway from this episode. Rather than reviewing the show, I’d rather have an a-ha moment that’s very specific. It’ll mean much to me. Once you do that, iTunes will ask you to rate this episode. I hope I’ve earned five-stars from you. Will you do that for me?
It’ll take three minutes out of your day, but what you declare could provide you and others reading your review, a valuable learning lesson. If you don’t have an iPhone, it’s available on Google Play and Stitcher as well. I have one final gift to give you in honor of this 54th episode. It’s complimentary access to my video e-course. You’re going to learn how to identify your market, create your message and capitalize on the most lucrative media sources available to you.
Assisting Versus Helping Clients: Nothing can empower the literacy, even the fluency, of learning a new language than learning the art and science of ethical influence.
You won’t have to pay the $197 tuition like everyone else does because you made it this far. All you got to do is go to MarketingOnlineMentor.com. You could qualify for our clear path mentoring, but that is too early to decide that because there’s an eligibility process. Go there. Find out what it takes and hopefully our paths will cross again.
That does it for this episode. I do hope our paths cross again. This is the show dedicated to making ethical influence within your reach and bring more certainty in every part of your life. Please do whatever it takes to join me next time because our topic is going to be How to Start Your Business Legacy.
Have you thought about what your legacy is? Do you even care? I encourage you to come and read. Invite a friend or bring a study friend. I can’t wait to connect with you then. It’s super fun if you study with someone else. You can even bring them to this episode if you liked it. You can subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher or Google Play. You’ll learn how to start your business legacy. I wish you good sales and see you next time.
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