156 - How to Comfortably and Authentically Sell Your Coaching

As a coach myself, I understand how uncomfortable you might feel when it comes to selling your coaching services. After all, it's not just about offering your expertise; it also involves selling yourself as the perfect coach for them. However, the exciting part is that selling your coaching can be a fulfilling and satisfying journey, especially if you embrace an approach that aligns with your authentic self.

In today’s episode, we’ll break down how you can create comfort for yourself and your potential clients during the sales process. I’ll break down this process into 6 ways to build a connection with your prospect based on trust and understanding and how to turn your obstacles into opportunities. Tune into this episode, and I will guide you through a quick and easy process that can transform your selling stress into inevitable success!

Authentic selling is all about taking the time to truly listen and understand your client's needs.

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Transcript

Preview: Ask the question of like, what was it about that person? Or what was it about Debbie that made me feel like I could trust her? Everything that someone sees about you or hears about you is selling you even if somebody else is talking about you. And by the way, you guys, if you are not doing marketing regularly, your silence is also selling them too. Your silence is telling people that you're not very consistent in your business and that you don't have a business that requires lots of marketing. So authentic selling I believe requires consistent, committed clear action by you. 

Intro: Hello, I'm Debbie Shadid, the host of the Life Coach Business Building podcast. If you are ready to have more clients in your life coach business, then you're in the right spot. Each week I'm gonna teach you super simple strategies to grow your business without feeling overwhelmed and without spending money on paid ads. If that sounds interesting. Stick around and let's get started.

I want to ask you how you feel about sales. When you think about your coaching business, I'm just curious, were you thinking about the fact that you were going to have to become a professional salesperson? That's what I want to talk to you about in today's podcast. I want to talk to you about having a comfortable conversation about how you create comfort for yourself, and how you create comfort for your client. So you can make selling your coaching more comfortable and easier for you.

Today we're going to talk about how you do that. I'm going to walk you through a quick process. I just did a training on this last week and it was six steps to sell more authentically. And I'm going to leave the link for the replay here. So you guys can watch that. I think I'll be able to go deeper in the workshop than I will on today's podcast, but let me hit some of the high points for you. 

Really the goal of this podcast and the goal of my workshop was to help you create more comfort with your selling. So I want you to think about creating a process. For many of you, you have been through some sales training of how to do online sales. For me, that feels really inauthentic. The kind of selling that I like to do is what I call no arm twisting, no convincing and no offering to people that are the wrong people.

So you actually get to create your own sales rule book. And I'm just going to teach you a new way of thinking about sales. Authentic sales is really just about you showing up as you telling your story and really communicating in a way that feels more effortless to you, how you can help a client achieve the goal that you're selling.

Authentic selling really requires you to take the time to really listen to your person, to be able to explain exactly what your solution is, and to give you the potential client, the prospect, the time to be able to make a well-educated decision. There doesn't have to be pressure when it comes to authentic selling.

One thing I want to point out to you guys is that you're selling from the very first interaction that you have with someone. We typically think about a sales call as being the time that you're on the consultation, but I want to tell you that you are selling from the very beginning. So from the first time you met me, you had a first impression. Many of you guys have watched my Canva workshop, or maybe you've come to an actual free training that I've done. do this a couple of times a month, or maybe you've just listened on the podcast. Either way, you have an impression about me. And you either have decided that you trust me, you know my story, right? You feel connected to me. That's what I want you to think about when you consider how people are connected to you when you show up authentically. And people can really see that and see that you're genuine. If you're genuinely interested in people, you will also be genuinely interesting, all right? So I want you to think about how you can show up that way.

I want to tell you a little bit about my sales story. I've been selling forever. I mean, since I was 15 years old, I've been selling and I've been really good at it. Then I moved my business completely online in 2017. I have to tell you, I immediately hired some coaches to help me in my business and one of them was a sales coach. And she talked to me about how difficult it was to sell online and about how the process would be different than me selling in person. Even though my whole career I've been in sales and I've sold millions successfully without any pressure. I started selling online and I felt like I had to manipulate people.

I don't know if you guys have been on the receiving end of one of those consultations or maybe a webinar, but that's the way I felt. so traditional online sales methods actually include sort of a format where you leave information kind of out, like in a webinar, and if you guys have attended a webinar where they were telling you kind of like everything you thought you needed to know, but they didn't actually finish the whole story. Like they tell you what you need to do, but they don't tell you how to do it. Have you been there? That is the kind of selling that I'm talking about like they invite you and entice you to come to a consultation, but they haven't told you enough about the coaching that you could get from them the same way with a sales conversation or a consultation call.

There are very strategic questions in traditional online sales that you ask to sort of set the stage and get the customer really ready and eager to buy from you, but you don't actually offer it to them right away. You wait for them to ask. And that to me just feels off. If I connect with somebody right away and within the first five minutes, I think, wow, gosh. I would love to work with you. And what I have is exactly for you. I tell people that. That doesn't mean that I finish up the consultation right then, but I show up in really a sincere, authentic way. And that's what I want to encourage you to do because I think that you'll feel more connected in your sales process if you do that as well. 

I can tell you, you guys that my sales it changed dramatically. Once I started really tuning into what felt true to me and I sort of threw out the rule book that I had been given by many sales coaches of how I should follow a certain consultation format. Once I did that, my results changed very quickly. I typically sell between eight or so out of every 10 people that I talk to. So I would love for you to give this a shot too, and just check in with yourself and see if you can change your results by approaching your sales calls with a more authentic approach. So you want to consider about that first impression that you've made if people are really connected with you, with your true identity.

Again, you can think about other coaches that you have connected with yourself. And sort of ask the question of like, what was it about that person? Or what was it about Debbie that made me feel like I could trust her? Everything that someone sees about you or hears about you is selling you even if somebody else is talking about you. And by the way, you guys, if you are not doing marketing regularly, your silence is also selling them too. Your silence is telling people that you're not very consistent in your business and that you don't have a business that requires lots of marketing. So authentic selling I believe requires consistent, committed clear action by you. That's what I want you to do to get prepared to sell your clients easily.

The idea is, is that I want you to bring your clients prepared to you, ready to buy. And that happens when you have effective marketing. People understand your story, they relate to you, and they also understand the transformation that you provide. When we talk about urgency that you have in a consultation call, you can naturally create urgency When you show somebody that you care. When I think about you guys in your coaching business, I feel like it's urgent for me to have you work with me because I know that you're wasting time trying to figure it out. I believe in my coaching so much. I know that you should be working with me. Do you feel that way about your own coaching? You want to tap into where you once were so that you can remember how miserable it was or tap into, you know, maybe the way you're going to get somebody to their goal and really be able to remember how that feels so that you can talk about that. That's how you create urgency to buy. It doesn't have to be through pressure, manipulation, doesn't have to be through pushing any of that. 

All right. One of the other things I want to ask you is what do you offer? Do you offer a coffee chat? Do you offer a discovery call or are you offering a time to get together to get to know somebody and talk about the coaching that you sell? Are you really clear about that? Because if you're not clear about that, and somebody comes on the call and they are ready for you to help them with something, you know, ready to get that free coaching, and that's not what you intended and you know you want to sell them coaching, then you're going to feel a little bit off when you start that conversation.

So tune into what your story is. Really get genuinely connected with your niche. Think about the process that you offer in your coaching and be prepared to communicate that in a way that is easy to understand. Again, thinking about getting your client prepared to buy for you. Then you want to think about pricing in a way that feels really good to you. Like I never tell people how to price their coaching because I want to make sure that you love your price so much that you can sell it comfortably. And then you really want to outline what your conversation will look like. What's it going to look like when you have that actual consultation call with somebody?

Let me run through quickly with you how that might look, a super simple format. I want to talk to you first about creating comfort for your prospect before they even get on a consult with you. And the first thing would be for you to tell them what to expect. So, before somebody has the call with you, you give them the layout of what happens on these conversations.

I think we forget that people are nervous. If you haven't had a consultation call ever, and you, you know, somebody is reaching out to you to talk to a coach and consider this for the first time, they're nervous. Like they don't know what to expect. They've never met you. They don't know anything about this coaching thing seems a little crazy to them. They don't know how much, you know, it's going to cost. So they come with some apprehension and a lot of times the things that you guys are coaching on are nerve-wracking in itself. They don't want to talk about the anxiety they have. They don't want to talk about the trauma they have or whatever it is. So consider the fact that people are nervous and prepare your prospect for what it is they could expect when they come on to the call with you. 

Then you want to create comfort for yourself. You do that by again, understanding your offer, by mapping out your conversation call. And I'm talking about the timing of it. You decide like, okay, for the first 5 minutes, I'm going to get to know them. The second 10 minutes, I'm going to do this. So you want to outline the actual way, the flow of the conversation and have some questions prepared that are important questions that you want to ask people. I put that together on a Google document and I actually have it open on my screen when I'm having a consultation and then I always want you to practice. 

Practice makes perfect you guys and I want you to plan to handle objections. Money is always going to be an objection. It's a natural objection. And let me tell you, sometimes it's not even an objection. when you say the price of your coaching, sometimes people just need a moment to think, you know, we jump to the conclusion when there's a pause. And they're like, huh, or, oh, we automatically read into that, that, that, oh, means that's too much money. And I know where your brain probably goes like, what kind of deal should I make with them?

But what I want to offer to you is that that objection is just a pause. It's just a moment where they're gathering their thoughts. Maybe they're thinking, what credit card am I going to use? How am I going to pay for this? You know, how am I going to explain this to my spouse? Maybe that's all they're thinking. So expect that there'll be a money objection and then you're prepared for it. So then when somebody does pause for a moment, you're not like, oh my gosh, this is going to be a problem. 

The last thing that I want to mention to you to create comfort for yourself is to do the thought work before you get on the call. So you need to clean up whatever doubt you have. You need to remind yourself what an amazing coach you are. You need to remind yourself that you know more about this particular topic than what the other person does. Consider the fact that they scheduled a consultation because interested in buying coaching.

It would not have scheduled a conversation if they did not want to help. That's a simple thing that can help you shift from being nervous to being more sure and more confident when you're on your call. The goal is to have a comfortable, confident conversation with somebody right where you're explaining what you do, where you're getting to know somebody, and you're offering to help them.

Here are the six parts of your consult outline. You can just take some quick notes or come back to this if you are driving in your car. The first thing is that you just want to open up with a casual conversation. Hey, tell me what's happening for you. What brought you to the call? How do we know each other? Where do you live? How's the weather? That kind of stuff. And it's just going to be a couple of minutes where you just get connected with someone. 

The second section is going to be where you're going to ask him, hey, tell me what's happening for you. You know, what brought you to the call? What have you tried? You know, what do you want and why is this important to you now? Those questions are going to help you figure out how you want to handle the rest of the call. You do have to sell coaching still. So you need to sell the answer to the problems that they have. They're going to tell you what the problems are. They're going to tell you what they've tried and you're going to sell your services based on what they told you. 

The third part of the conversation is to recap what they've just said. I like to just say, all right, let me just go back over this, make sure I've got this right. And then ask him, is there anything else that I'm missing? It's so helpful for people to hear things back. Sometimes they get to talking and really sort of pouring out their heart in a way they hadn't even thought and it will help you show them that really maybe what's going on for them is deeper than what they even realized because they hadn't talked to somebody about it.

Then the fourth step is to transition to how you're going to help them. I want to point out right here that you get to decide if you actually want to help them because you can tell somebody right then, you know what the coaching that I do is not for you or you're not my ideal client. And I just want to tell you, you know, I can refer you to somebody else, something like that. You do have control. You don't have to work with people that you don't want to work with. I know that sounds silly, but you didn't even have to make an offer. You can say, Hey, it was great to meet you. You know, I can already tell that what I do is not for you. So, you know, thanks for connecting, and have an amazing day.

When you transition to talking about how you're going to help them, if you decide to help them, you might share a story and talk about the connection that you have with them. Like, look, I heard what you said is happening for you. And I can tell you, I've been there. I know how this is. And I want to tell you, this is you know, how I got to the place where I'm at, and this is exactly what I do in my coaching. Explain your process, and share your expertise. 

All right, the fifth part of your consult outline is where you're going to talk about your offer. Practice this, you guys. Your offer is to solve the problem that they have is to get them the result that they are looking for, and then you're going to explain it, you're going to talk about the price, you're going about the timing, and you want to handle the objections. If you are not able to get somebody to a yes right there and they say, look, I need to get back with you, that's okay to you guys. Getting back with you doesn't necessarily mean no. Now, I do want you to take some time to really clarify with somebody. 

Now, before I let you go, just let's be honest here. Are you interested in this? Do you want to have a follow-up conversation or if you're going to talk to your spouse, how can I help you with some answers that they're going to have? You know, what are the questions they're going to have? So you can answer the questions in a way that can support them. if they want to have a conversation with their spouse, then you want to help them prepare for that conversation. You want to ask, tell me what's going to come up. You know, if that's the objection that they have, like, I need to talk to my partner. We don't make big decisions like this until we've discussed it.

Great. Tell me what questions they're going to have, and let's talk about how you want to answer them. Because if you really want to do the coaching, then I want to help you be able to, you know, sell this idea to your partner because that's what they're essentially going to do. They're going to be selling your services to their spouse.

So prepare them for that. Oftentimes what I find out is that they actually have an objection in there that they didn't ask you. And sometimes when they ask those questions to have you help them prepare to talk to their spouse, you'll find out that they have a question that you didn't answer already that you didn't address. And sometimes you get to the end of that and they're like, you know what, I want to do this. They won't have a problem with it. Let's just go ahead and get started. I found that to be the case many, many times. 

All right, the last step in this 6 part consult outline is you want to enroll people. Now, that sounds simple, but that means that you have to have the payment links ready. You have to have your Zoom links ready. You have to be able to tell them, Hey, you know, here's the details. And I want you to do that while they're on the consultation call. Do not let somebody go and say, I'll send over the link later. unless you're so busy that you can't do it any other way, I want you to actually say, all right, let's take a couple of minutes. I want to make sure that you're set. Here's the payment link. You go ahead and take care of that. I'm going to get the Zoom link. I want to, you know, if you've got an education portal, or if you want to give him a handout or talk to him about what the process is going to look like. Do all of that while they're on the consultation call. So be prepared to make that efficient. 

If you're going to follow up with somebody set a time to follow up. It is so much easier to take care of that while both of you are right there, you're like, grab your calendar. I'm going to open my calendar. Let's see when we can connect for a quick follow-up call and just take care of it while you're together.

All right, a couple of other bonus tips that I want to mention to you. Do not coach on consult calls. If you want to offer a free coaching call, then offer a free coaching call. If you're going to do a consult, do not coach on it because coaching on a consult is like giving somebody a Band-Aid when they need to have surgery, right? You give them one small answer. If I tell you how to do something in your business, let's say you have a question about marketing and I answer it for you, that is only one piece of building your business. One marketing thing, it's not going to get your coaching business built. So if you leave me and you think like, Oh, I know how to do email marketing now. No, like there are so many parts that go with creating a successful coaching business. This is the same for you and your process. So if you have a tendency to coach, make your consultation time shorter so that you do not give somebody the bandaid that they think they need to solve their problem. I also want to recommend that you have a pre-call form that somebody fills out so you can gather information about somebody before you ever get on the consultation.

Let me recap this for you guys. Authentic selling happens number one when you feel good about the process. Number two, when you are confident in what you do. Number three, when you are having a comfortable conversation where there is no arm twisting. 

All right, again, I want to invite you to watch the full six steps to sell more authentically, my full training that I did just last week where you can see all the steps. I'll go through each one of those in detail and you guys can create your own sales conversation plan while you watch the workshop. The link for that is in the show notes. And, gosh, let me know what questions you have about selling. I would love to be able to support you and answer any other questions. Y'all have an amazing day and I will talk to you very soon. Bye bye.

Outro: Okay, ladies, that is it for today. Before we go, I want to invite you to head over to debbieshadid.com. I have this incredible Canva training, specifically designed for life coaches where I'm gonna teach you how to use Canva to create beautiful graphics to market your life coaching. All right. Have an amazing week. I'll talk to you very soon. Bye bye.