BIO: Ana Melikian, Ph.D., is an optimist who had to overcome two bouts with cancer to learn that pursuing happiness is a fallacy.
STORY: When Ana started her online coach business, she was looking for the quickest way to find clients. This hunger made her fall for two marketing strategies that never worked. The first was a search engine that promised to be better than Google, and the other was publishing a chapter in a book.
LEARNING: Marketing does not get you clients; building relationships does. Have both sales and marketing departments.
“Marketing will not get you the client. Building relationships will.”
Ana Melikian
Guest profile
Ana Melikian, Ph.D., is an optimist who had to overcome two bouts with cancer to learn that pursuing happiness is a fallacy. To choose happiness is a much more powerful strategy to tap into our highest human potential.
Either by working with leaders and their teams, or other coaches and consultants, Ana supports her clients to break through their mindset limitations and upgrade their psychological operating systems so that they achieve better results than ever in work and life while enjoying the process.
Worst investment ever
When Ana moved to the United States from Portugal, she had to reinvent herself professionally. She decided to be an online coach, so she built a website hoping that people would find it. A salesperson contacted her and told her about this search engine that was going to be the next Google.
The salesperson showed Ana these really cool and well-done features on the search engine. They did a demo for Ana and convinced her that if she invested in the search engine, she’d secure a permanent placement on page one of search results. Ana signed up believing she’d get more clients than she could handle. She didn’t get a single client.
The same thing happened to Ana again. Someone else contacted her online with an idea to write and publish a book that would position her as an expert and get clients quickly. The company would just interview Ana, put everything together, and then publish a chapter in a book with her photo. Ana thought, okay, why not? So she put more money into it, and they fulfilled their promise and published her in an excellent chapter.
But when Ana received the book, she realized that the other people featured were not the kind of people she wanted to be associated with. So the books stayed in a box somewhere in storage in Ana’s house.
Lessons learned
- Marketing does not get you clients. It’s a way of creating awareness.
- Focus on building relationships if you want to get clients.
- You need both marketing and sales departments.
Andrew’s takeaways
- You will fail if you think that just doing marketing will bring you clients.
- The sales process (guiding a customer through the buying process) is different from marketing.
Actionable advice
Don’t wait for people to come and work with you. Create opportunities to have conversations and build relationships.
Ana’s recommended resources
No.1 goal for the next 12 months
Ana’s goal for the next 12 months is to create a plan to market and sell the book.
Parting words
“Be gentle with yourself and keep moving forward.”
Ana Melikian
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