How Deirdre Harter and Carmen Reed-Gilkison Build and Nurture Relationships

Full Episode Transcript

Deirdre: I am Deirdre Harter a CPA and Business Strategy Coach and this is my partner Carmen Reed-Gilkison, a certified whole-person coach.

Carmen: Hey Everyone!

Deirdre: We started our business, encoreempire.com to help women in midlife who want to grow a profitable online business in a way that leverages their unique life experience and honors their values to provide the financial and time freedom they have worked for so long and so hard to attain.

Deirdre: Carmen, you introduced me to MemberVault, can you tell us a little bit about why?

Carmen: Yes! I’m one of the MemberVault Founding 100, so I’ve been with them since the beginning. The thing I love the most about MemberVault is that Mike and Erin listen to their audience and make improvements based on use-case scenarios, the reason I insisted we use it for our learning platform is because it fits right in with one of our core pillars - relationship marketing.

We’re all about relationship-building and MemberVault does a fantastic job of allowing us to not only collect valuable data from our ideal target market but to nurture our client relationships right inside the platform - it’s AMAZING! But I could go on and on about all the fabulous things! I’d like to hear what you like best about it Deirdre.

Deirdre: It’s hard to choose what I like best about ...there is so much to love! One thing that comes to mind is that it’s the perfect solution for many of our clients and because we use it as our learning platform as well as for our free resources, they can see the possibilities for themselves in their business.

We encourage our clients to model what we’ve done and make it their own. That fits right in with our philosophy of showing them what to do instead of just telling them what to do to build out their platforms and funnels.

It’s so versatile that it works no matter what their business model is and it’s easy to set up and be up and running quickly without all the overwhelm usually associated with learning platforms, websites, and landing pages. It’s great for starting out and is robust enough to grow with your business.

Carmen, you’ve worked with our clients on getting them started, what did you find to be most helpful in that process?

Carmen: To me, it’s a very intuitive process to set up, and if someone runs into a snag all they need to do is search the MemberVault Collaborative group, or the help articles to find their answer. Customer support is absolutely top-notch at MemberVault.

The other thing that I love, and our clients end up loving, is that it doesn’t matter what type of business they have, they can showcase their offers beautifully on MemberVault. Another selling point is for our new to online business clients, setting up an MV site is a quick and easy way to validate their offer by making sales without having to waste time, effort, and money building out a website. That aligns with our coaching to teach people to validate first before anything else! Once they’ve validated and are making sales, then they can pursue building out their new business.

Plus, our clients love the gamification, and I know what your favorite of that is Deirdre, but I’ll let you explain.

Deirdre: It is my favorite part!! Being rewarded for taking action is one of the most powerful strategies you can put into place for your audience and MV knows that. Here is how we have used it in our business. We run a free workshop 6 times a year called the Business Validation Method. We use the engagement points (and we renamed them to fit our brand to “empire points”) to increase participation during the workshop. Attendees earn points by filling in each day’s answers from the “workbook” we provide and they can cash in their empire points for valuable and exclusive prizes. This not only increases engagement and excitement but it gives us insight into their answers so we can help guide them through the workshop to ensure they get the result they came for. It also keeps them on our platform because they can go back to the workshop notes and answers they entered over and over again and they see all the other resources and programs that we have to offer. We’ve received rave reviews over this feature alone. It’s simply brilliant! If you’re interested in seeing how this works as an example for your business, you are welcome to join us for our next BVM workshop.

Yes! Basically, we love everything about MV! If you’re a woman over forty whose business is just not giving you the results you want and need, we invite you to join our Facebook group The Empire of Unstoppable Midlife Women Building Profitable Businesses (facebook.com/groups.empireofunstoppablewomen).

And, if you’re someone who serves women over forty we want to invite you into our world as well. We’re all about collaboration over competition and we love to explore potential events or referral arrangements. We work with e-commerce businesses, online educators, and coaches, and service providers of all types.

You can also find us at encoreempire.com and you can check out how we are using MemberVault at https://encoreempire.vipmembervault.com/