The Abundant Practitioner Podcast By Dr Tilean
Welcome to our podcast channel. I'm Dr. Tilean, a Chartered Psychologist and Behaviour Change Expert turned Business Mentor for Practitioners, Coaches and Consultants who want to start and scale their own purpose-led business so they can live a soul-nourished and profitable life without compromise!
The Abundant Practitioner Podcast By Dr Tilean
Ep 52: Transforming Your Business with Strategic Questions and Soulful Sales Techniques
How can simply asking the right questions transform your coaching business? Tune into this eye-opening episode where we unlock the secrets to using strategic questioning to overcome business challenges, deeply understand your audience, and craft compelling marketing strategies. We'll reveal how resonating with your audience's language can elevate your practise. Plus, we uncover the art of soulful sales—where empathy and understanding take center stage—helping you connect with clients on a profound level and shatter those mindset obstacles to scale your business efficiently.
Step into the "doctor frame" mindset as we explore the power of targeted questioning in business processes. Just as a doctor diagnoses a patient, you’ll learn how to ask precise questions that lead to genuinely beneficial solutions for your clients. By mastering this thorough and confident approach, you can build unparalleled trust and offer recommendations that truly support your clients' needs. This episode is packed with actionable insights on how effective questioning and active listening can revolutionise your marketing and sales strategies, driving your business toward greater success.
Thank you for joining me today on The Abundant Practitioner Podcast. I’m so glad you carved out this time for yourself because you 100% deserve soul-nourishing and soul-aligned success!
If you’re keen to dive deeper into my world, here are my socials where you can learn more about how I specifically help Health & Wellbeing practitioners start and scale their own soul-aligned and profitable coaching business. As a fellow practitioner who has been operating in the online coaching world since 2015, I’m excited to help you successfully navigate it too. You can also reach out to me on these platforms, if you have any questions!
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Thanks again for tuning in, and I'll see you next time on The Abundant Practitioner Podcast!
Welcome to our podcast designed for psychologists, therapists and counsellors who want to take their business online and live a soul, nourished and profitable life without compromise. If you want to know the secrets used by practitioners just like you to navigate the global e-learning market successfully, then you're in the right place. I'm Dr Talib, chartered Psychologist, business Mentor and your host, and welcome to the Abundant Practitioner Podcast Power of questions that is required to skyrocket your success. Yeah, so questions are very, very important. The questions you ask yourself, the questions you ask other people Right, all have the ability to take your business from where it is to where you want to go to, right, and so I really want to discuss this, because sometimes it's overlooked. Yeah, and so in the email I sent out earlier, I spoke about how questions can help you navigate challenges right. The power of your questions can help you navigate your challenges right that are coming up, that you're seeing coming up, and flow through that. Questions have the ability to help you understand your business right your audience right your offering. Understand your business right, your audience right your offering through market research right. Questions have that power to be able to do that. Marketing questions enable you to create powerful, effective marketing.
Speaker 1:What is marketing? Marketing is how you communicate yourself to your audience, to your prospects, right? How do you attract an audience that hears your message and then comes forward and wants to hear from you, right? So the whole idea of messaging yeah, the effective messaging businesses need effective messaging a lot of the time. I've spoken about before.
Speaker 1:Often practitioners are not taught business skills right in terms of how to message, how to market their services, how to sell their services, and so when it comes to looking at a typical practitioner's website, often they're using their own language and not the language of what their audience needs to hear, right? So they may be using terms such as you know, I am a skilled, licensed clinical social worker, for example, and I'm skilled in this methodology and I've done this certificate and I know EDMR and CBT, and these are words that, just going over the heads of the people that you're talking to, often right, and because we're using our own language, and the skill of marketing and messaging is to use the language that connects with the audience that you're talking to. If you've got an offer for a specific audience, are you talking the language that they need to hear? Right? And you've got to think about. Sometimes you can talk directly to your audience if they're the people that are investing. But sometimes there's a two tear approach. For example, let's say somebody's got a business that wants to serve young people, right? Teenagers yeah, the teenagers wouldn't necessarily be the people that are investing in the service, and so the language has to both appeal to the teens, but also those that are investing Maybe it's the parents or other stakeholders right, and so your language matters.
Speaker 1:How do you develop powerful language? It's by understanding your market through questions, right, effective sales, and I talk about soulful sales, how you can create sales where you are articulating what you, how you can help and who you can help to people that need your help and therefore they're able to step forward and say absolutely, I'm ready for this. That comes through effective questions that you ask in consultations or meetings or or in events or whatever, right? So questions I would hope that you start to see and hear are really really powerful and necessary, right, in order to move your business forward, right, and they can have an ability to really scale your business rapidly once you learn how to ask yourself and others really powerful questions. Yeah, so let's start with the first point that I made in terms of using questions to navigate business challenges Right, using questions to navigate, sometimes, the mindset challenges that come up.
Speaker 1:Right, sometimes people have, you know, the and we're all, we're all subject to this. Right, no matter what level you are at, no matter how long you've been running your business Right, I have been running my business for over nine years now in the online world. Right, and there's still moments where it's like, oh, the whisper comes up of like, oh, should we do it this way? Right, ok, can you really do this? Yeah, and it's about recognizing how you respond to the, the, the noise that comes up in your head sometimes, right, in terms of these, these thoughts that may creep up to put in questions that may not be serving you. So you have to be ensuring yourself that you're asking yourself questions that are empowering questions.
Speaker 1:Right, you're asking yourself solution focused questions. Yeah, often, people's minds shut things down with statements. Right, it's not possible for me. There's no way I could. Right, these are things that often, sometimes, the mind is challenged to just answer in statements, in statements, in statements. Right, and you want to train your mind to answer yourself with questions. How would I make this possible for me? What needs to happen in order x to happen. Right, if I was going to look to make this result happen, what kind of things do I feel I need to do next? Yeah, where, like asking yourself the questions, right? So it's about really recognizing like I want to be asking the right questions myself, because then my brain can get to work to navigate solutions right, to think about what are the solutions that could be there that are important in order to help me cope with this and help me move forward through this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's say there is a um, let's talk about today, right? So we normally have an email that goes out just before the time to say you know it's time. Yeah, now, that happened. It didn't go out, right. So do I go into panic? I'm like, oh, the email didn't go out and catastrophize and go into that space. Or do I ask myself a powerful question the email didn't go out and catastrophize and go into that space? Or do I ask myself a powerful question the email hasn't gone out? What needs to happen next in order to be able to support the people that have been able to arrive on time and still be able to get an email out for those that need the reminder to help them be here, right, mine can go to work on a quick, creative solution, right? Okay, cool, I could which I did, right ask for girl support. Can you help me to get this out there, right, or I could? I've just said hey guys, let's, let's pause a couple of minutes, give me a moment to just send this out, right?
Speaker 1:And so the way you navigate challenge, because challenges will occur in your life. We're not no one's immune to challenge. Right? Challenges will come up, especially when you're striking out to do something different, great, amazing, right? God's called you forth to really raise up and just go for it. Challenge will follow. So how do you navigate? That is very, very important to recognize. How am I going to navigate and shift through challenge? And the way you navigate and shift through challenge is through the power of the questions you ask yourself. It's instead of using disempowering statements or disempowering questions, you start asking solution-focused questions, right, and giving yourself solution-focused statements, your brain will go to work and find the answer. Yeah, so that's the first point I want to cover.
Speaker 1:Second point market research. When you are in business, you should always be hearing from your market. Your audience is what I'm talking about here, the people that you are here to help, right. One of the things I talk about with my clients is getting like, first things first, we get really clear on what's your mission. What's your mission? How are you? How are you here to help people? Who are you here to help, right? Why are you here to help? What's the problem that you are here to help with? And we want to be able to articulate that really clearly and concisely, right. And so it's about recognizing, like, as you articulate who you're here to help and how you're here to help them and why you are in this position to help them right now. Right.
Speaker 1:It's, then, being able to have your ears open, right, your eyes open, receiving information about the problem, right, and about what they have tried, what is not working, what the challenges are happening, right. All of this is what you should be continuously, always listening to. This is not just in the startup phase, right? Oh, I'm going to put a business together. Let me do some market research and never do it ever again. You should consistently be like hearing and have channels in your business where you are understanding what's going on in your market, right, what's going on in your particular field, so that you can respond to, that, you can talk to, that, you can keep up to date with what's going on and how to maneuver, right.
Speaker 1:And so this is through again, again, questions that will reveal these things when you're in conversation with anybody that is um on a similar mission, asking questions right, what have you found happening within the market right now? Right, what challenges are you hearing going on in the market right now? How are you currently navigating? What challenges are you hearing going on in the market right now? How are you currently navigating? What struggles are you coming up against? Right, what's really been helpful? Okay, so it's not just also find out the challenge, what's actually working? Why do you deem that to be helpful? Right, also, I'm going to insert here what is a question. This isn't going to be a particularly helpful when you're navigating challenges.
Speaker 1:Questions start with who, what, where, why, how sounds very like yeah, talena, I knew that, but I say this because often people don't start with that. Right, when I say what questions you have for me, they're like well, let me just tell you a story right in 1965, right, and they go back into a whole backstory of this right, which then takes them away from even their ability to get your mind to ask question first and then go into the. The understanding and the detail next is going to be really helpful for you when it comes to navigating challenges, when it comes to conducting market research within your business, whether that market research is done through interviews, through polls, through um surveys, through whatever right, the art of asking questions is going to be very, very helpful, okay, so, um, that's really important to to recognize that. And this then leads into what I was saying as well around how it helps you. The art of asking questions helps you navigate marketing messaging. How does questions now lead into effective messaging? If I know how my audience articulates the challenge, the problem, the solutions they're seeking, what they have tried, why it doesn't work right, what their constraints are, what they're hoping for, I can utilize the language of my audience to talk to my audience instead of utilizing my own psychobabble, right, and trying to communicate with them. So it's about recognizing.
Speaker 1:You know the academic talk in the sense, right, much of the people that come across me are highly academic. Yeah, as a practitioner, you've trained, you've been skilled, you have had to hand in assignments, dissertations, thesis. Right, you've had to change your word. Don't say that, say it this way, can you articulate yourself in a clearer? Can you go a bit deeper here? I've been here, right, and so what that can do is it can make you really think about how do I speak, how do I communicate. And so when you're thinking about how you communicate, you divert back to academia. How was I taught to communicate in an academic level? Right, but when you are communicating when it comes to marketing for business, right, you are using techniques which is called direct response marketing.
Speaker 1:Where you want to respond, you want to speak to people, you want to create connection. Connection is done by talking people's language, so you have to ask questions to understand the language. How do they talk about the challenges that are going on in their world? Right, and utilize that in your marketing. Yeah, one of my clients, you know she helps by-walk leaders who are exhausted, right, just really like change their narrative, right, really change their narrative of how they're going to move forward with their success. And you know, one of the things was like, when she came, she was always using the language around burnout, burnout. And when we spoke about this, she was like my people don't even, they wouldn't even identify with burnout, they would not say that they are burnt out. They would say that they are burnt out. They would say that they are exhausted, that they are tired, right, that they are being pulled in every single direction, but they still got to show up, right. So when we use that language, there's connection. When we use that language, there's consultations coming through. When we use that language, there's sales coming through language, there's consultations coming through. When we use that language, there's sales coming through, revenue coming through. So messaging matters. But how do you get effective messaging? It's through questioning, through active listening, right, and it's through utilizing that Language matters, yeah. And then the other thing I want to say is language matters as well when it comes to sales.
Speaker 1:Right Now, often people have a perspective about sales is selling their thing, and when I talk about soulful sales, soulful sales is not about selling your thing, right? So many people got so passionate about the thing they've created, right, I've created this program, I've got this practice. I just want, like, this is what you need, or you know, counseling is the way or whatever, right, whether it's the methodology or the business or the program, that is the thing. Right Now, you've got to recognize that, while people may be coming to you and booking a call because they need help and to gain help. They're going to need a service or a program or something that they're expecting to join. They're not coming to speak to you because of your service. They're coming to speak to you because they have a problem that they need help with to get a solution. So if you're going to change your sales into soulful sales which can really see your sales percentage shift massively in terms of what happens for your business, it's about shifting your perspective about sales. It's that you're not here to sell a thing. That, in a soulful sales conversation, is to find out what are the challenges going on for somebody, right? Where do they need to get to?
Speaker 1:Through the power of questions, right, and asking specific types of questions. There's types of questions I teach on in the trainings on software sales in our academy, right, which is like are you you? Are you asking questions that are specific questions? Exactly how many times have you felt yourself anxious in the past week? What about today? What about yesterday? Right? Exactly how much? Condensing it, honing in understanding the real picture as opposed to just being generic? Okay, tell me, talk to me about your anxiety. Right questions. If you ask the right questions, you'll get great answers because it allows the mind to go to work to the question it needs to answer, right? Other types of questions right, factual questions, yeah, factual questions, right. These again like these logical, factual questions exactly how much or what have you done in the past to try to alleviate this problem? Right, what have you done? Again, factual, yeah.
Speaker 1:Sometimes people are in their minds, right, in terms of what's going on. You need to help the person that you're talking to come down into reality of what specifically is happening. You know, sometimes when I speak with people right, when I speak with any person that comes into the academy, goes into, I have the conversation with me first, right, I want to make sure it's the best next step for them and if it's not, I'm totally open and honest If it's not the right time for them or whatever, right. My point of talking to somebody is never to sell them the academy, right, it's to find out what's going on for you right now and what do you need right now. And maybe the academy is what you need, but maybe it's not right and I'm not precious. I just want you to have the right help that you need.
Speaker 1:Right, but I've got to ask some factual questions. Yeah, exactly where is your business right now? We're in start up phase. Are you revenue generating? Right, exactly how much revenue generated have you done? Yeah, so I'm bringing them into an understanding of what's going on. I get an understanding of what's going on. How much revenue generated in June? What about May? What about April? Right, how many people have come forward to ask about your services? Where is that? Right, what's the profit margin on your business?
Speaker 1:Some of these questions I might be asking they don't even know the answer to, but that then helps give clarity of like. Actually there's a gap in my knowledge here. Right, this is something I'm not even looking at. So if you ask questions, you can help people better, right? Other questions, yeah, readiness questions, qualifying questions not everybody that wants change is really ready for change. Right, as a behavior change expert my my background is behavior change expert under the realm of health psychology right, not everybody that is like, yeah, I would love to stop smoking, is ready. Like in the readiness oh, yeah, I really want to lose weight. Right, I really want to get healthy. It's in a readiness, there's a desire and then there's a now. Right, there's a cycle of change that happens. So questions that are related to that, yeah, you know so different questions that are inserted into your sales structure will help you with your business and consultations right To be able to understand the person in front of you, for you to then be able to give them the right solution for them.
Speaker 1:A great way to think about this, right Before we have a discussion on this, a great way to think about this, is a doctor frame frame. Right, like when you go to a general practitioner or a doctor. Yeah, they're going to ask you questions, right, and they're going to get really specific before they give the recommendation of what is needed. And that recommendation of what's needed is not because they want to push a particular thing, right, they've got to give you what is right for what you've come for.
Speaker 1:So if you go to the doctor and you've got a knee pain and you and they've got to do that in a tight window, right in the UK, it's like 10 minutes, yeah, like 10 minutes. Are we going to diagnose what's going on and give you an effective pathway, right? So I go into the dp and I'm like, hey, I've got a knee pain. Exactly how long has that knee been hurting? Right, they're asking an exact question exactly how long has that knee been hurting, right? Does it hurt when you straighten your leg? Does it hurt when you bend your leg? Stand up for me, let me touch hair.
Speaker 1:Is there any sort of straight into diagnosis, like, like, looking at what is going on? Are you doing that in your business, right, and then being able to marry that with the right next solution, which? And being okay, that the right next solution might not be your solution, and that's okay, right, but if the right next solution is your solution, that you are also confident about suggesting that the right next solution is this this is what I have available in order to help you with your problem. Right, and this is how that works. How can I support you to really go for that? And it's the same with the GP.
Speaker 1:Let's say, the next solution was something that was surgery or treatment or whatever that would then need to be addressed by. This is what I would propose you do next, right, how can I help you prepare for that? Yeah, so really thinking about that as well can help you when it comes into the sales process as well. Ok, so I would like to hope that, by giving you this understanding of questions. It really makes you think that actually the power of my questions has the ability, gives me the ability to really change the way I do business and evolve my business.