Sales First: The 7-Stage Framework I Use With Every Coaching Client

In this episode I'm talking about when you actually need a business coach, what to look for, and why most of coaches are missing the thing that would actually help you grow. I'm also pulling back the curtain on the exact 7-stage framework I take my clients through, from evaluating where your business really is to building a 90-day plan that fits your actual life.

If you've ever wondered what it looks like to work with me, this is the episode.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A few years ago, I was a guest on a podcast where I gave the advice, don't hire a business coach. This feels silly now because I am a business coach. So how did I end up here? The honest answer is that I think most business coaches are more like therapists. You pay them a lot of money, you spend your sessions talking about how you feel, about your business, and you might leave with some emotional clarity or at least feeling better, but you have very little to actually do, which is fine if you just want to feel heard. But if what you need is revenue, it's actually a really expensive way to not solve your problem. That's why I built my coaching framework the way I did. When I sold my marketing agency, I walked away with a really clear picture of everything I had gotten wrong, but also a really clear understanding of the things that we did that were right and what helped us scale to seven figures so quickly. As a marketing agency and as a marketing expert, I was really hoping that the result I would come to after this time of reflecting on what had helped us, you know, perform well and scale and all the things would be marketing. I would love to say, oh my gosh, I put together this incredible marketing plan, and here's what I did to go viral, and here are the things that really helped us take off. But what helped us scale was that we focused on sales. When I say we focused on sales, I mean that I was obsessed with lead generation, conversion, getting people across the finish line. I think I made 64 versions of our proposal. I was obsessed with getting people across the finish line, and I was less obsessed with our content, our marketing. Those were all nice to have. Those to me felt like they nurture people who are on the fence. I am going for people who have a direct need. And we really focused on driving that revenue. The reason I decided to start coaching people is because I think most people miss this. If you were sitting there as an agency owner today and you're like, oh my gosh, uh my revenue is low, what should I do? And you look to the internet for solutions, you're going to see a ton of different frameworks and funnels and online courses that tell you you need to create more content, you need to put more of yourself into this business. It just takes more time. But let's be honest for a second. If you are trying to drive more revenue, if you are trying to scale, what you need to do is sell more. I give this analogy a lot, but I have a friend who told me, I really want to become a runner. And I said, that's awesome. We should go meet at the park and we should go run. And she was like, Yeah, we should totally start a running club. And I was like, That sounds so fun. I would love that. And she's like, Well, what would we do? I'm like, well, I think we would have, you know, a bunch of people show up at the park and then we would go run. And she was like, Well, I really love the idea of running club, but like, I don't know if I really want to go for a run. Like, I really just want to like get together with people. And I was like, Well, I think that's just hanging out at a park, which also sounds fun, but I don't think it's a running club. And if we're honest with ourselves, how many of us are calling our sales plan a sales plan, but it's really a content plan, or it's really a marketing plan, and it's not a sales plan. Sales looks like going and saying, Hey, you, my ideal customer, I would like to give you my services in exchange for money. It is going out and asking past clients for referrals. It's knocking on doors, it's not very fun, right? But the content is. The content is more fun. Creating the marketing plan is more fun. And so one of the things that I have seen with all of my clients is when I say, What is your sales strategy? They read me their marketing plan. And I stop them and I say, No, no, no, your sales plan. We're going for a run here. What is your sales plan? And they blink at me. If you are sitting here and this is you, you are in good company of people who are so smart and want their businesses to grow, but they just don't have the right pieces in place yet. I started coaching because I saw this gap in the market of people who needed better sales strategies. They needed to reorient their business around growing revenue and sales, and a need for somebody who could be a coach and an accountability partner and push them that wouldn't just focus on mindset, but really focus on the things that were going to help them grow and scale faster. In an effort to make this more approachable and accessible, I made this a 90-day roadmap that I take my clients through. We meet bi-weekly, I take you through each of these seven things, and we really do a deep dive on your business and reorient it. In this episode, my hope is to take you through these seven things that I focus on with all of my clients so that you can either do this at home or it gives you a really good glimpse into what it looks like to work with me. Before we dive in, I want to add a quick footnote to this episode. I am a huge proponent of mental health and do think that there's a lot of work to be done there in the space of being a business owner, especially if you're running a team. So if you are feeling like, I really need to talk to somebody about getting my head right, I would really encourage you to go find a therapist that you really like. It's not to say that a business coach can't give you great mindset advice or help you out of a tough spot. I just think that most people need somebody to really push them in the business coach spot and somebody who can kind of be a softer place to land and more of that empathetic ear in a therapist. And so if we're looking at both of these roles in a business owner's life, right? The therapist and the business coach, I think there's definitely a Venn diagram here. There's an overlap where their fields definitely cross. Your therapist might give you some really practical things to do in your business. I know mine did. And your business coach can tell you, hey, you know, I think that you're avoiding looking at this, or I think that you need to have more confidence here. But I do think that having separate spaces, one to tackle how you're feeling and one to create an action plan, having those separate spaces is so important. Okay, so with that footnote said, I want to dive into how I've laid out this framework and how it has worked for some of my clients. Step one, the very first thing we do is evaluate where you actually are. Not where you tell people you are, not the version you post about, but where you actually are. Revenue, bottlenecks, blind spots, PLs, debt. Tell me everything. I want to go into all the stuff you're pretending isn't a problem. I want to know why your clients close, why they pay you, what is working well, but I also want to get into the stuff that you're like, I don't want to look at that. I really don't want to dive into this. For me, that was what I was paying people and our actual costs. I had a really hard time diving into all of that. I can do it for your business, no problem. But it was really hard for me to actually wrap my mind around what are our operational costs? Are they really that high? What can I cut out? This feels impossible. And doing that alone can be really overwhelming. So I really like to start there and I really like to look at how we can optimize some of this and triage the issues that are currently going on in your business. So that's our first thing is we just do a deep dive and look at everything in its real state, what's actually happening, no judgment. The second part of the framework is actually an offer review. I call this part offers and margins because a lot of times we're looking at the offer for how much money it's actually making you. There was a really bad day when I realized one of my favorite clients was actually costing us $1,000 a month. In other words, I was paying $1,000 a month to keep them as a client. And so we let them go and I instantly made $1,000 back. This feels like a duh, Susie. That would make total sense. But almost all of my clients, we've been able to find offers where they're actually paying people to do it. It doesn't make sense for them to keep offering this. And so I want to evaluate your offers with you and say, are these actually making money? Do we need to change the pricing? Is what's included actually enticing enough for your audience? And how can we simplify this to make sense for the problems that they have? If there are things that we decide need to change in your offers, which there almost always are, at that point I give you homework. This takes place in a portal. I'm going to actually assign you tasks. I never give you more than three to do over our two-week period. And it's going to be things like restructure what's included in each of your packages, put this into a new proposal, send this to me for review. You can do all of this really simply, and there's an action plan with a step of how to do this, how we're going to change your offers. It's not an elusive, like, huh, seems like your offers need to change. I'm like, we're going to change them in this way. Do these things. It's very straightforward. There's no guesswork when uh we wrap up each of these sessions. The third step in this framework is lead generation. So you know that I'm the biggest fan of lead generation. If you've listened to this podcast at all, you know that I love outbound lead generation. I'm a big fan of inbound as well, but I love some outbound. And I want to create a plan where you have both of them. Now I'm not going to tell you, hey, you need to go invest in, you know, $5,000 a month of outbound unless it makes sense for your business. But what I might do is put together a plan for you that looks like, hey, could you DM five people a week? That's outbound, right? Go back and listen to the inbound versus outbound episode where I talk about the house party. I really just want to get you in the routine of some kind of outbound sales that starts to put your business in front of people that haven't heard of it before. At the end of the session, you're going to walk away with an outbound schedule of things to do to grow and an evaluation of your inbound marketing plan to make sure that we are still nurturing people. This session is crucial to the next step, which is the sales strategy. So our fourth meeting, we're going to go through and say, these people are coming to you because of these offers. They're very clear. Your messaging is all in line. You actually get them on the phone. What are you going to say? Before this meeting, most of the time, I really like to review some of your sales calls. I listen to them. I read through the transcripts. I'll take some notes and I'll actually give you some feedback on a sales call that you feel like went really well and one that didn't go so well. And we'll dive into a new sales strategy that might be implementing a two-call close system or something similar where I can actually practice with you and role play with you on how to better close your clients and increase that close rate so that you're putting more dollars on the table. So at the end of this, we're going to have your sales script ready to go. And additionally, most of the time, I also put together a few closing mechanisms with you. Things like how are we going to get them to sign by a certain day? How are we going to incentivize them? What are some bonuses you'd like to roll out? We're going to give you a few tricks up your sleeve to make sure that you can get people closed when you want them to. Once we're through all that, so at this point, we've evaluated the whole business, we've worked on offers, leads, and sales, we've worked on all of these things. It's time to make sure that you have the support that you need. So we're actually going to do a team evaluation. I want to talk to you about did you hire your best friend and it's not working out so well? You can't tell anyone, you can tell me. I'm going to talk to you about all of the different nuances of how team structures work. Most of the time there's a backstory to this, and I want to know it. I have worked with spouses who work together. I have worked with people who have hired their, like I said, best friends or sister-in-laws, and stuff can get really complicated and dicey. And what I don't want to do is come in and say, you know what? Line item. They are too expensive. You need to fire them because life's more complicated than that. And no one knows that more than me. So if you are feeling like there's some team dynamics that I don't know how to navigate myself, having a sounding board of someone who can say, okay, let's look at what you're paying them, let's look at what's not going well, and let's come up with a plan for how to reorganize this so that it works for everyone. Sometimes that is firing someone and you want to talk that through somebody. Sometimes it's a new hire and you want to know how to onboard them. Whatever that case may be, I've walked through this with so many of my clients, and I feel like it can be really helpful to have somebody say, Hey, you're feeling really emotional about this, but here's what actually needs to happen. Here's your game plan. Leaving the session, you will have a new org chart and a plan for how to implement it. Our sixth session is what I call CEO mindset, and I need a new name for it because it's still not mindset coaching. What I talk about is the difference between a freelancer and a business owner. And a freelancer says, I just want to sell my time and I'm not trying to maximize revenue. I'm just trying to sell basically my goods and services, right? But a business owner is trying to scale. They have a bigger vision in mind for where this is going and what they're capable of and what they're going to be doing. And I want to talk about some of the ways that you're operating in a freelancer mindset that you need to change into a business owner mindset. A boss of mine a long time ago uh said something like, Are you going to be a decimal person or a comma person? And I didn't really know what he meant. He said, Are you more worried about saving the 75 cents or, you know, rounding up to the nearest dollar? Or are you trying to make a thousand dollars? Are you betting on, I want to play the long game. I want to go make us money. I'm not trying to save us money. I'm not worried about every little detail. I've got this bigger picture in mind. And I realized, and he was saying, you know, companies need both, right? But I realized I want to be a comma person. And business owners are comma people. You don't need to be a decimal person running a business. You need a really good EA or an operations person who can be your decimal person. But if you're sitting in that driver's seat, you need to go be the comma person for your business and go run that. And that's exactly what we talk about in that sixth session. In the seventh session, I'm not going to leave you high and dry. Um, a lot of people do stay on with me and we continue meeting together. Um, and we can go through this process as many times as you want. A lot of people go through it like once a year. And finally, in the seventh session, we build the next 90 days. A real plan, not a vision board, not a list of intentions, a concrete prioritized plan that tells you exactly what you need to be working on and in what order so you can grow revenue without working weekends and giving up your whole life. I care a lot about this part because I watched myself and I've watched a lot of my clients build strategies that were so beautiful and completely unsustainable in practice. This 90-day plan has to fit your actual life. Otherwise, it's just a fantasy with a deadline. I tell you all of this in this episode, not because I'm trying to sell you on my coaching, even though I would love to work with you. I tell you all of this because I want you to notice something. Every single one of those seven stages touches sales in some way. Your offer is a sales problem, your lead generation is a sales problem, your pricing is a sales problem. And the reason you can't let go of these tasks is probably a sales problem. It's because you haven't built enough revenue consistency to feel safe trusting someone else with parts of your business. When I say I'm a sales first coach, this is exactly what I mean. Sales is not one piece of your business. It's the piece that's either going to make everything else work or feel harder than it should. If any of this is sounding familiar, I want you to think about what you've been avoiding looking at, not judging, just asking, because in my experience, the things that you look away from are almost always the first place to start. And if you're listening to this and you're like, I'm not ready for a business coach, my business just isn't there yet, or it's just not the right season, I would encourage you to take a quick audit of your business, write down these seven stages. They're all listed on my website at susiecoli.com and just jot down some notes. What feels good about your sales process? What doesn't? How do you feel about your lead generation process? Do you feel like your offers are in a good place? Do a quick assessment of where your business is. And if you have questions about that, feel free to email me. I would love to chat with you about it. But if that feels daunting, and it did feel daunting to me to do that by myself, I could never find that clarity on my own. Go ahead and schedule a call with me and we can start this process together. I would be so honored to walk through this with you, hear your story, and hear how your business came to be. They're my favorite type of calls to kind of get the full picture and the backstory of these businesses. I absolutely love it. And I would love to hear yours. So if this sounds like you, go to my website, susieconsoli.com, and we can book a call together and we can start the process of excavating your business and getting it to a place where it's making you a lot more money. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I hope this was helpful to you and I would absolutely love to connect with you soon. Keep an eye out for a couple new episodes coming soon. I'm gonna do some phone a friend episodes where I'll be talking with a few experts on things like funnels, if that gives you a hint of who I'll be talking to next and a few other really cool topics as well. Until next time, friends, sell well. Go make lots of money.