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Posts Tagged ‘coaching’

Creating a high-end coaching program doesn’t require special training. It’s something that anyone can do, with enough expertise and the right approach. How do you know what a high-end coaching program should look like? Consider joining a similar group to get an idea of how it operates from the inside, and take away valuable information about how you can structure and format your offering.

Find a Similar Group and Join It
Once you’ve really decided to expand your offerings and create bigger programs where you’ll get more actively involved with clients, it’s time to think about what to offer and how you can offer it. What is a top-level coaching program supposed to include? One of the best techniques for starting a high-end coaching program is to find a similar group – and join it.

The idea is not to join a group and steal all of its techniques and resources. You might want a group that relates to a totally different industry than you’ll be covering, or even a group that works with how to create and market high-end coaching programs. The point is to find a group and join it so you’ll experience how a group like this operates, and get take-away points for your own planning.

Get an Insider View of What You’re Offering
Joining a high-end coaching program gives you an insider view of what you’re offering. This provides an opportunity for you to watch an expert in action, and look at how someone established is offering their programs to participants. This gives you an insider perspective of the types of things that need to be included in a program like this. It might also give you tips and techniques that improve your business overall, or as related to the program you intend to create.

Joining a high-end coaching program can give you valuable take-away points to implement in your own program. You may find that you really like something the mentor offers, or you may decide that something lacked information or you’d rather see something presented in a different way. Look at both the good things and the things you didn’t like about the program, and find ways to integrate that knowledge into the program you’re developing for your own clients. This can help you evaluate your potential offering with an insider’s perspective, and better gauge what clients might like or want and what might not provide value to your clients.

Think of a High-End Coaching Program as an Investment
If you join a high-end coaching program to get a better idea of what to offer in your own program, think of it as an investment. Having this inside knowledge can help you better craft your own program to appeal to your clients, which can create better testimonials and generate interest and buzz among your potential prospects. By having your own experience with a top-level program, you know what clients expect and you can create a program that provides real value for your clients. This benefits everyone involved, and you might just find other aspects of your business improving as a result of the program!

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Many entrepreneurs, small business owners and other professionals find themselves focused on earning an income, finding new clients and the day-to-day struggle to survive.  Having enough income and cashflow to grow your business rapidly is not an uncommon problem.  I often hear people talking about their expected income for the next day, weeks or months ahead.  They focus on knowing where the next paycheck is coming from because they don’t have enough confidence in their existing client base or cashflow.   They fear their income will dry up.

Have you ever felt like that?  If that sounds like you, then it’s time to STOP focusing on your income.  It’s time to start focusing on a long-term plan for success and diversification.  But how?  How do you free yourself from the day-to-day financial worry and really start to thrive?

The answer simply lies in starting your own high-end coaching program.   A high-end coaching programme (when designed and delivered the right way) will provide enough guaranteed revenue to enable you to stop worrying about money and be free to focus on your long-term success!

This is how the strategy works …

Sell Once a Year to Generate Guaranteed Revenue

• With your high-end coaching programme, if you market and sell the right way, you will only need to focus on the selling once and then you’re done for the year.

• Create a program with a limited number of spots, and you’ll only have to sell long enough to fill those spots and then you can focus on serving your clients and creating alternate revenue streams.

• Create a program with a fixed time limit, such as my annual programme, and you only have to sell those spots once per year. Then you’ve got the commitment for the income, and you’re free to focus on other areas of your business. No more worrying month-to-month whether you’ll have enough cash for next month; with a high-end coaching program, you can earn enough money to free yourself up for other pursuits.

Free Yourself Up to Look at the Big Picture

One of the biggest benefits for you and your business of creating a high-end coaching program is freeing yourself up to look at the big picture. If you’re like most people, you spend countless hours per week working on finding enough business, and the rest of your time goes to satisfying your existing clients. You never have time to think about the long-term plans for your business, or how to diversify your revenue streams.

Once you have the committed income of a high-end coaching program, you can stop spending so much of your time selling yourself and your services because you have a guaranteed revenue stream. Instead, you can focus on creating the other steps to achieve success in your business, and put together a long-term plan for your business!

In order to truly become successful in your own business, you’ve got to stop focusing on immediate income so you can begin to build a road map for long-term success.   Worrying about your day-to-day income is short-term thinking and can seriously hamper your long-term business success. When you start a high-end coaching program, you get financial commitments for a large portion of your revenue and begin looking at other ways to improve your business success.

So if you want to see an end to your day-to-day financial struggles and the beginning of long-term success, it’s time to start your high-end coaching programme!

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Have you ever come across a successful business, on the face of it, looks really simple and straightforward? You look at the website, at the marketing, and the products, and it seems like the winning formula is one that you could apply to your own business. Whatever they are doing can’t be rocket science, so you won’t have to be a genius to mimic it and get the same results.

So many people do this when setting up their business. They look at people who are getting the results in their business that they want in their own and think that it looks easy. It’s pretty simple to copy what other people are doing, apply it to their own business, and watch the profits roll in. They tell themselves that they can figure it all out on their own.

They are wrong.

If you think that you can easily follow someone else’s roadmap to success without direction, you will fall into the same trap. This is one of the lies that we tell ourselves, because it’s so much easier to think that we can teach ourselves than it is to seek that advice from others. You can use someone else’s experience to fast track your own success but it has to be done the right way.

There’s a simple method of doing this: invest in mentoring. It will help you realise how much you are holding yourself back by simply trying to copy other people.  You can also be assured that your investment will be returned more times than you can imagine. It’s amazing how much mentoring gives back to you.  It’s not just the information that mentors share with you, but also the fact of having someone who is already getting results believing in you.

Let me give you an example of the power of mentorship. One of my mentors is Yanik Silver, and my business has really changed since I joined his mastermind group. Just before I held my first big workshop, I talked to him about my plans. I was really nervous about it, because I’d never done a three-day workshop of that size, and I had never charged £1,500 for people to come to the workshop. I remember saying to Yanik, “I think this might be possible for me.” He looked me right in the eye and said, “Yes, I think you can do that.”

That simple sentence was the value I got from investing in him. It wasn’t that I needed specific information from him or advice on how to run my workshop. Instead, it was the fact that someone who was already very successful was able to tell me that I could be as well. I needed to hear it from someone more experienced than me, and it gave me the confidence to run the seminar the way I had planned it. That seminar was a great success – both for me, and, I hope, for the people who attended.

On the other hand, before one of my conferences, I did a series of preview calls.   A number of people emailed me at the end of the series telling me that they had gotten so much from the calls that they didn’t think they needed to go to the course. A year or so after the course, I did a bit of sleuthing, and from what I can see, none of these people had made any real progress. Not one.

I’m not saying that if these people had come to my conference, they would all now be multi-millionaires – I’m not trying to suggest I have all the answers for everyone. But it did make me wonder how many “goose chases” and “blind alleys” they have been down because they tried to progress on their own, or because they kidded themselves that they could do it without help.  I’ve tried that track and I know it doesn’t work.

My message to you: invest in a mentor’s help. And you will get help. There are too many pitfalls you will come across when you think you can figure it out on your own. If you keep telling yourself that you don’t need someone’s help, one year from now you will be no further forward in your business. You have a chance to do things differently, so take that chance and start achieving!

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Bernadette’s Stepping Up! members have been making amazing progress. This program includes ongoing support, free admission to one of her live events, and so much more! If you’d like more information: http://bit.ly/SteppingUP

What is the process someone must follow to become a paying client of yours?  Is it something like this:
1. The person calls you or sends an e-mail.
2. You respond, but may end up playing telephone tag for awhile.
3. You eventually connect and arrange a meeting.
4. You do a consultation.
5. You write a proposal.
6. You ask the person if they want to proceed with you.

If there are that many steps, there are too many steps. And there is one common denominator in each and every one of  those steps. You. So we need to wean you off your personal involvement.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “No. That’s absolutely impossible. My business is too complex, there’s so much detail. I need to speak to the client individually and really understand their needs.”

And yes, there are certain business situations that call for that. But not every time, and it’s not the only way.

So, here are the reasons we need to fire you from your sales team.

1. The greater the dependency on you, the weaker your business. You’re putting a lid on your income because you become a bottleneck when everything must go through you.

2. Too much personal investment in a potential client weakens your negotiating position. If you met someone out of the blue who says, “I like what you’re doing but will you do it at half price?” you would probably respond, “No way. Who do you think I am?” But you’d likely put it more politely than that.

But what if you’ve had prior phone conversations with a client, submitted proposals and had meetings? Now you’ve gone quite far down the path.

And after you have invested your time and your resources, the client comes back to you with, “We really like you. We really want to work with you. But we can only afford half of what you’re charging.”

You’re more likely to waver because at that point you’re already invested in the potential sale. Then you are faced with the agonizing decision of cutting your losses completely, or accepting the low fee and hoping for more work later on. That’s not a position you want to be in.

3. Too much personal involvement in a sale creates a false expectation for your client relationships.
Has this ever happened to you? You receive great and attentive service from a sales person before you purchase something from a company. Then, the moment you hand over your cash it seems like they’re not interested in you anymore.

You may think you would never treat customers that way, but you run the risk of this happening if you give a lot of personal attention to people before they become a client. Because you can only do that as long as you’re not busy.

Sooner or later, when your business is at capacity and you’re working with many clients, you’re not going to have the time. Something will have to give. Or you will be so focused on bringing in new business that existing client relationships will suffer.

So, be aware of the dynamic of your business relationships with clients. Be available, of course, but keep it realistic and professional.

4. The final reason we need to fire you from your sales team is that you can’t be duplicated. I love working with clients one-to-one, helping them figure out solutions to their problems. But as my business has grown, I’ve had to pull myself back from those types of conversations. I can’t sustain that level of service on a personal basis throughout my whole business. So now the people that get one-to-one attention from me are the people in my mentoring program.

The key is to eliminate at least some of the one-to-one activities that you’re currently doing to generate new business. Remove your personal self as much as possible from the manual labor and intense personal involvement of getting new clients.

Fire yourself from your sales team and focus on finding tools and resources that will attract more clients with less of your time.

One of the biggest challenges with selling services is that often the client does not have the same sense of urgency that you do. Anyone who sells bespoke solutions has probably experienced this. There’s a good chance you’ve been in a situation where you’ve made a proposal, you’ve put hours of work into it, and then you’re following up and you hear, “Oh, next month,” or “We’re going to make a decision on that next week,” or “It’s on hold.”

It’s so frustrating isn’t it, when your prospects do not share your sense of urgency? So what can you do to stack the sales odds in your favour and get things moving?

When I started my fledgling training company back in 1996, one of the first hard lessons I learned was that I did not have the funds to finance long decision-making time, and unfortunately in some cases it was going to be 6 or 12 months before I saw any real business gains. I knew that I was going to be out of cash well before that point. So I needed a way to turn things around – fast.

So, in desperation, I said to myself, “Well, what if I just run a one-off day on my specialist subject, and do it as an open programme? I’ll hire a room in a hotel and do the training.” So I started offering a one-day training on cold calling.

I had accidentally stumbled across a valuable technique. I discovered that running my own open courses helped position me as an expert and gain invaluable experience ‘in the field.’ It gave me an opportunity to ‘showcase’ my expertise. There were some people who came on the course and said, “This is great. We need to do this in house.” And so it sped up the process of landing large sales contracts.

From the clients’ point of view, the advantage for them was that they could sample what I was offering at much lower risk. If they sent one or two people to an event and they didn’t like it, then there was no great loss. But imagine if the whole sales team had been taken from their usual duties to experience a training programme, delivered in-house, that wasn’t suited for their needs? That’s a nightmare that no sales director or training manager wants to contemplate. So you’ve got to lower the risk for them.

When you package your expertise and deliver it via a live event, you immediately change the sales dynamic. Instead of you having to wait for months for a decision, you gently nudge your contacts into taking action. That’s because, by their very nature, live events have a limited availability. If you’re selling in-house training or consultancy, the main frustration you experience is injecting urgency and getting people to act. But if the only way they can experience you is via a live event, you immediately have a built-in deadline and built-in scarcity.

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned about marketing and selling over the past 10 years is that you MUST give people a reason to act NOW. First of all you need to recognise that your biggest competition, whether you’re selling to organizations or individuals, is not the other training company or the other consultant or coach down the road. It’s the status quo. Most people would rather stick with what they know than take the risk of making a change and getting it wrong so it’s really easy to keep putting you off. One of the reasons open workshops, seminars and training courses work so beautifully for speeding up the decision making process is because they have two elements which have been proven time and time again to both give people a reason to act and increase urgency. 1. Limited availability 2. A deadline.

When you’re selling a bespoke solution, it’s a challenge to credibly build these elements into your proposal, but when you’re selling open programmes, they are an intrinsic part of the package. There are a limited number of seats in the room, and the course is taking place on a specific date. Once the places are gone, they’re gone! Once the date has passed, the opportunity is gone.

Now, most people who are selling training, coaching or consulting do not exploit these elements to their advantage, but if you do, you can transform your business.

So what happened to me, completely by accident, was that as I started packaging my in-house training into an easier to buy, off-the-shelf solution such as a one-day programme, it generated immediate benefits. I got the primary cash-flow coming from bookings for my training course, followed by the secondary benefits of bookings for in-house trainings.

If you are a trainer, coach or consultant, you MUST seriously think about offering your expertise via an open seminar, workshop or training course. Even if training isn’t your main service, and your long term goal is consulting clients, if you build an event around a technique or a skill that you can teach prospective clients, it WILL stimulate follow-on business. And, if you market it the right way and it will put immediate cash in the bank too.