How do coaches and consultants use Shopspotting?

At what point do your clients need a shop system?

At the start, it is all about positioning, target group and offer. Tech is usually not a topic yet, and rightly so. The shop system comes later, often at one of these points:

• The first offer is ready, and the first clients want to pay.
• One-to-one coaching turns into a group programme or an online course.
• A membership or community with a monthly fee is about to be added.
• There are already several tools, and maintaining them eats time that is missing from the coaching.

If you train coaches, the topic often has a fixed place, for example in a module on tech and sales. In business consulting, it comes up as a question within a project. How to tell whether Merchavio suits a client is explained in which sellers suit Merchavio.

How do you bring it up without a sales pitch?

In your programme

First explain what a shop system needs to do for a digital offer: checkout with one-off payments and subscriptions, a course area or community, access management, customer data, their own brand. With this list, your participants work out what they need. Then show how Merchavio covers these points, and label that part as advertising, right at the start and next to the link in your materials.

In a workshop or webinar

Say right at the start that the workshop contains advertising for Merchavio, and put “Ad” on the slide or handout that contains your link. If you sell with Merchavio yourself, you can show your own shop. Then say that this is your experience and that it may look different for others. Structure, labelling and follow-up emails in detail: Shopspotting with workshops and webinars.

In a one-to-one session

Here you bring it up when the time is right or your client asks about it. Start with questions about their offer, tools and goals. A guide for this is in how to recommend Merchavio.

What don’t you promise your clients?

A shop system doesn’t sell anything on its own. Whether an offer takes off depends on positioning, the offer itself and marketing. So you never say things like “With this system your first launch will work” or “This is how you’ll finally make a living from coaching”. Promises of success like these are prohibited by the partner terms, and they don’t fit your role either.

Instead, say what Merchavio makes easier in concrete terms: one login instead of many, selling under their own name, money straight into their own Stripe account, customer data that stays with them. And that they can try it free for 5 days.

How do you protect the relationship of trust?

• You say openly that you receive a commission if someone signs up through your link.
• Your coaching costs the same and comes with no extras, whether or not someone uses your link. A bonus session for signing up through your link would be a benefit the rules don’t allow without Merchavio’s prior consent.
• Anyone happy with their current system is not pushed to switch.
• After the workshop, you only contact participants who have agreed to it.
• What you see about your sellers in the Shopspotter area is used only to check your statements, not in coaching and not for advertising.

Your clients should never have to wonder whether your advice serves them or your commission. If you stick to the points above, the question doesn’t come up.

When your clients want help with the setup

If you also support your clients with implementation, you can offer the setup as a separate service and bill it yourself, independently of the commission. How that works is in supporting your sellers. Your Shopspotter account is free to create:

Become a Shopspotter