In the first year of my coaching business, I generated mad sales for….other coaches. How is this possible? Let me explain.
I had a competitive advantage in that I was a good writer. So I started a blog and email list. For an entire year, come hell, high water, pneumonia, Beyonce album release, personal crises etc., I produced a blog and emailed it out to my list. The blogs were good, people told their friends about my work and my list grew.
I wrote about the personal and professional challenges women entrepreneurs and leaders faced, and provided useful tools and resources to help them overcome those challenges. I talked about the benefits of coaching, and the power of coaching programs. In addition to writing the blogs and sending them to my newsletter list, I shared them on Facebook and occasionally on LinkedIn. My call to action was always to sign up for my newsletter.
I did A LOT right with those blogs but I also made a crucial and costly mistake that would end up sending dozens of would-be buyers directly to the coaching offers of my competitors. I failed to make consistent strong offers to work with me.
I told myself I was adding value, building trust, nurturing relationships. And all this was true. But while I was doing those things, I was also doing this:
Using my platform to guide groups of prospective clients through the marketing continuum of: problem awareness, solution awareness and brand awareness WITHOUT making them “offer aware” — i.e. clear on the specific way they could work with me. I also failed to make consistent offers to work with me because a) I made the mistake of assuming they KNEW how to work with me and that I was available to be hired and b) I was lily-livered and didn’t want to piss anyone off by having the audacity to make a powerful offer to graduate from the free stuff to the legit, paid transformation.
In short, I whipped my crowd into a frenzy and gave them nowhere to go. So they went and got their coaching needs fulfilled elsewhere.
We like to talk about women’s unpaid labour and I have published about this consistently over the years. But the most irritating kind of unpaid labour is the unpaid labour you force on yourself by bringing your prospects to your door but rarely opening it to let them in.
Actually, I lied. The absolute WORST kind of unpaid labour is being your competition’s “Marketer of the Month” by failing to make consistent strong offers and thereby leaving your prospects little choice but to jump aboard someone else’s lifeboat when they have been waiting to climb aboard yours. Duuuude. That’s really bad.
To recap: make strong offers and make them regularly.
My strong offer for you today is to consider the POWER of creating a lucrative high ticket group program. As in — the kind of program that elevates your income and impact to a whole new level. I’ll be running a 2-day virtual workshop on this next month and if you are still reading I strongly suggest you put yourself on the waitlist so you can get details when we release them. We are limiting registration to 40 tickets and I’ll open them up to the waitlist first. So if you’d like to be notified take 30 seconds, and get thyself registered for the waitlist.