The ones are not ready but have been interested in what you offer you need to keep them close, you need to make sure that they think of you when maybe a crisis happens or they are just ready for a change and they don’t go elsewhere.
And I find that happening an awful lot, people make offers, get a no, and they let them go and then what happens is 2/3 months later they realize that they are working with another coach and didn’t come back to them because they didn’t nurture them. So, I teach my clients how to keep all those people close so that you predictably attract high paying clients and you know exactly where those clients are coming from and when.
Isabelle Giroday: Awesome. Now there are a lot of myths around sales Marie, do you have any particularly popular ones that you want to share with us.
Marie Rodgers: One of the biggest myths is that if somebody talks an awful lot, they are going to be great at sales.
The fact is that the best sales people are the ones who know how to listen and rather than talk and we all have had experiences where we’ve had buying situations where we have bought and felt we thoroughly enjoyed it and in most cases, that is because it’s a two-way conversation where you just feel like you are having a conversation, somebody who truly gets you.
So the ability to listen is really important but in order to be able to do that you first need to be able to ask great questions and that’s really what I teach people how to do, ask amazing questions in a real conversational way to bring out information for both sides, because the point of self-realization is the biggest reason why somebody will buy, not because you persuade them but because they actually realize themselves what’s missing. By asking great questions you help them to deep dive in a way that they perhaps have never done before to realize the impact and consequences of what they do or are not doing.
That’s the biggest myth, the other myth is that for some reason people think, “oh I’m not a natural salesperson,” but we do not come out of the womb with the ability to sell. So, people think this is some natural skill, it’s isn’t a dark art, it’s like anything, you can learn how to be able to sell your coaching services and the reason why your perfect prospects should buy from you, that’s what you need to do because after all without consistent high paying clients, you don’t run a profitable business, you only have an expensive hobby.
Isabelle Giroday: Yes, I have heard so many times people say, “oh you know, I couldn’t sell anything for the life of me” or “I wasn’t born a salesperson, I can’t do it, it’s impossible.”
Marie Rodgers: It goes back to that confirmation bias which is the biggest challenge that people face in the coaching industry. They have formed an opinion “I’m not naturally a salesperson,” they create a belief system around this opinion and then they look for the evidence that will continuously support their beliefs and that is literally stopping them from having that thriving business and the lifestyle that they actually want.
Sometimes we are in denial and resistance but if that denial and resistance is actually causing you a consequence that you don’t want, you have to ask yourself, is it the best thing to do?
Isabelle Giroday: There is another issue, especially online, which you call ‘the field of dreams’ where people get sold all kinds of dreams and promises. How is this a problem?
Marie Rodgers: When I came online, I listened to what many of the gurus where saying, it sounded great, everything was a solution, everything felt like, “oh do this one thing and all of your clients will find you.” It would just be so easy, you just sit there, build a website and your clients will come. “Create an email list and your clients will come,” “do this and your clients will come” and I fell into it thinking it must be different online and then I realized very quickly that these solutions don’t work, unless you already have a big list or are well-known.
The field of dreams mentality is “build it and they will come” and we all kind of get a shock when we do build it and they don’t come. Thankfully I didn’t spend too long in the field of dreams, it was probably just under a month before I went “hold on a second, you spent 7 years creating campaigns that don’t rely on any field of dreams, let’s take that knowledge and expertise that has been really successful and bring it online.”
And that is what I did and the minute I came out of the field of dreams and actually created my own sales campaign, I created a six-figure business for myself in 8 months without spending a dime on Facebook ads and having any complicated technology and then I went on and I taught others how to do the same.
The same results happened to my clients like Kelly Confidence & Life Coach who went from “I need to get a job” because of not having enough clients to” predictable high paying clients,” selling out her 1:1 coaching packages as well as a luxury retreat in Ibiza all within 6 months and she couldn’t believe how easy it was for her to do this.
