A year ago I was billing $20k/mo as a coach. I'm now at $40k/mo and I should hit $60k/mo by the end of the year. What changed? I developed a very specific sales process in the last two months.
For the first eight years of my coaching career, my sales process was "coach people until they want to pay me." That's not a summary, that was the entire strategy. Heck, I would tell prospective clients this was my plan. "I'm going to give you value until your mind is blown and you want to pay me."
It was obviously good enough that I built a viable coaching business with between 12 and 18 clients at any given time.
But is also sucked a lot of energy out of me and there were times that my business felt completely out of my control. Remember last year when I chopped off all my hair because I was so stressed out?
In the past seven weeks I have been completely heads down defining and testing what someone needs to know and experience at each step of the decision-making process:
* What does someone need to know before they talk to me the first time?
* What do they need to learn and experience in that first call?
* What do I need to know in order to move them forward?
Rinse and repeat all the way through "Closed -- Won".
Too many founders (including myself) exit the early sales period thinking in terms of deal-making. We can close business, sometimes lots of business in aggregate, but it's an instinctual thing.
And there's two big issues with this:
1) The only way to scale is through more leads, which can be expensive, and more sales effort, which is time consuming.
2) There is absolutely no way to effectively communicate that instinct to another sales person. So no one can do that work for you. You can't scale.
By defining a clear sales process, you find the weak points of the process (where prospects fall out of the funnel) and figure out how to fix them. This results in a far higher close rate, meaning more sales for less work.
AND, you can eventually hire people to execute that sales process.
Don't rely on instinct.
1) Document your process, even if it's a hypothetical one.
2) Evaluate experience compared to your plan.
3) Update that plan when something doesn't work.
4) Find a highly predictable and repeatable process and stick to it.
In the last seven weeks, I've cut a third of my leads before even talking to them. I've cut another third after the first conversation. I've closed more than half of the rest.
Let me know if you have any questions at all. I'm so freaking happy 😆🚀🤘🏻