Some years ago when I was a high tech marketing professional, I was known for training technical sales people. One of the courses I designed and rolled out worldwide in that company was known by my colleagues as "charm school". I think I made up the name, but people thought it was so funny and ridiculous given that we were doing heavy duty technical training, that the name stuck. Even our senior management, who collectively had a great sense of humor, called it "charm school". It was so successful that they didn't care what it was called. What happened was that I became known for developing and implementing an incredible success known as "charm school".
I'd forgotten about "charm school" until I recently developed a teleseminar series designed to teach independent service professionals (self-employed practitioners of all sorts) to market themselves and their practices more effectively. One day I realized that this was another kind of "charm school". The series is called Rev Up Your Revenues - 90 Days to More Clients and More Money, and I decided that its tag line should be: Marketing Charm School for Independent Service Professionals.
Like my previous version of "charm school", this series will help people become more effective, and charming, when meeting and getting to know their prospective clients. This version has some technical content on websites, internet marketing, and social networking, but it's no where near as technical as the previous version which was all about designing and configuring networks and networking gear.
The new "charm school" is also available worldwide thanks to the web and teleseminar technology. Like my previous "charm school", my students come from a number of different countries. A key difference in my non-corporate charm school, is that each student's business is unique - they don't all have the same job description. In fact their businesses can be quite different.
My goal is to teach practitioners who are really good at whatever they practice: life coaching, acupuncture, massage therapy, chiropractic, homeopathy... to think more like marketing professionals do. I want them to think about their clients' needs, how to get their clients' attention, and how to deliver the top quality information and services that their clients want. What's exciting is that in the end, my students become more comfortable and confident with marketing themselves and their practices. We work through all the issues and we develop marketing strategies and tactics that will work best for each of them and their businesses.
Do they become more charming? I think that more confident people tend to be more charming - so yes, they become more charming.
If you're ready to become more charming:
http://www.revupyourrevenue.com
http://www.revupyourrevenue.com/register.html
http://www.revupyourrevenue.info/