Post-it notes are easy to take for granted. Those little sticky, reusable strips of paper have a thousand uses.

And they make a lot of coins for 3M.

There’s a business lesson in Post-it notes for your coaching or hypnotherapy business. And no, it’s not what you expect.

The obvious lesson is that failure is not failure. They set out to create a super strong glue and accidentally made a weak glue that stays sticky.

Useless!

Until you find another use for it…

So, sure, there’s a business lesson there. Every time you think you have failed, try to see the success buried in the failure.

But that’s not what I’m talking about right now.

Post-it notes initially did not sell well. Imagine that you have never encountered them before. Would you be willing to buy pieces of paper… that stick to things? Doesn’t sound very useful, does it?

Some things in life can be hard to describe. Post-it notes are an example. You can talk about what they do, but until someone experiences it, they don’t really understand it.

Tetris is the same thing: a wildly addictive game that sounds boring and terrible when you describe it. “There are blocks… and you drop blocks into the gaps. When you complete a row, it disappears. No really, it’s fun!”

Offering a professional service can also be like that. People may not believe that you can help them.

Or they may not be able to imagine living without their problem, common enough for anything they carry around for years.

“I guide you to solutions” doesn’t quite work, you know? Just like Post-it notes, that’s more than useful. But people don’t really see how until they experience it.

So how do you get customers to experience your methods before signing up?

In the same way that Post-it notes became a huge success:

3M mailed a box of Post-it notes to the secretaries of the CEOs of every Fortune 500 company. They didn’t ask, they gave them away as free samples.

CEOs started using them.

Then they kept using them, which meant asking for more.

Everyone then became curious about these strange notes attached to the memos sent to them by these influential CEOs.

From there, it became fashionable.

You can do the same by offering free samples of your training or hypnotherapy.

What I am NOT suggesting is giving away your time for free. That is not the mark of a professional.

And no one would take you seriously if you did.

What I’m suggesting is this:

Weave your change work methods into your marketing.

Show your customers how to solve problems and grow, simply by reading what you write and listening to what you say.

Give them a taste of working with you.

How?

With content marketing.

But not by sharing “life hacks” or telling them what to do. That’s just as effective and popular as telling smokers to quit. The world has no shortage of knowledge, and your job isn’t just about imparting knowledge anyway.

It is about much more than that.