Ep #86: Consult No-Shows and the 8 Problems All New Coaches Face

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast, where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Hey coaches, welcome to episode 86. I have a treat for you today. You ready? But before we dive in, I have to shout-out my client Alex Ray in 2K for 2K. He posted in our group, “I just signed a client at my new pricing, 6K for six months. This is more than double my old price. The thought that got me here, if someone offered me this result five years ago, I would have paid 10K for the result. 6K is a deal.”

I freaking love this, Alex. And I’m just going to say, I remember coaching you, Alex, on all the yes’s that you were getting and you were making them a problem. We decided it’s fine for you just to succeed always and just get yes’s all the time and just keep raking all the money in.

So this post is proof that you clearly have worked on your thoughts about your success. So congratulations, Alex. Men of 2K, there are some and they’re making money. Going to shout them out.

Alright, so we’re going to talk about something fun today. I mean, fun for me to talk about. Not fun for you all to experience. We’re going to talk about no-shows on consults, and we’re going to talk about this because we’ve gotten a lot of requests in 2K for coaching on this. You guys make it a big problem.

And here’s why we’re getting a lot of requests on this in 2K. There are phases of problems that you have in your business. I’m going to tell you what they are. So the first phase is that no one reaches out to you or books consults ever. Then you join 2K, you start marketing right, people start reaching out for consults, but then they don’t show up. That’s phase two.

Then phase three is they show up and they say no, and you can’t figure out how to overcome their objections. And then phase four is that they say yes, but then they ghost you, or they send an email that they changed their mind or they forgot about some expense or they talked to their husband or their spiritual guidance counselor or their mother, somebody convinced them they should wait.

And then the next phase is they say yes and they start. And then they quit after a couple of sessions. And then they make it halfway, and then they quit. So you might get someone that says yes to six months and at three months they quit. And then, the final phase is they make it all the way through and then they don’t renew.

Actually, that’s not the final phase. That’s the second to final phase. The final phase that you eventually do get to, I promise, is they sign up for a consult and this is the ultimate phase, they sign up ready to buy. The conversation is just about the details. They show up to the coaching, they get results, they tell other people, and they keep coming back.

So I just want to tell you guys all the phases because this is normal to go through all of these phases. Now, let me give you a caveat. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to have to go through all of these phases before you get someone that signs up and makes it through all of their coaching. I have 100K earners who still struggle with people saying yes and then quitting halfway through.

This is a process over years of being a coach. I’m in the phase now where I still have some people that quit, but for the most part, 98% of the people that sign up for 2K and 200K make their money back, they go all the way through, or they’re still working on it. We have an incredible success rate. Most of our clients renew, especially for 200K. There’s no renewal in 2K. You get it for life, people.

But in 200K, most of our clients keep making money and keep returning. I think we had all but two returned for this round from the previous round, which was our highest return rate ever. So you do get to that point, but I do understand. I’ve been there. It is frustrating when you’re going through these phases.

You finally get consults and you’re so excited, and then you sign none of them. And then you finally sign them, and then they cancel before they start. And then they finally start and they cancel. I get it. It can be so frustrating because you’re like, I finally got there, and then it’s still not working out.

I just want to bring into your awareness, not to make you stressed out or anxious or take this as a negative, but I just want to put it into your awareness because you guys make all of these phases mean something is wrong with you and your business and you’re not going to make it and all of these things are evidence and proof and just tell you that you should quit now.

And really, it’s just these are the phases, the early problems of your business. These are the problems that you have to go through and there are different solutions for all of them. But today, we’re going to talk about phase two.

And when you join 2K, just so you know, we cover all of this. You’re going to continuously do this process and every time you do the process, you will clean stuff up in your marketing and in your selling and in your brain that will start to change these results.

So my clients who have had the greatest amount of success, they’ve gone through 2K like, five times, and then they’re in a couple of rounds. They’re in their second, third, fourth rounds of 200K and now they’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars and they’re not dealing with these problems.

So just know, it’s a process, and the more you go through it, the better you’re going to get. The less occurrences you will experience in these phases. So we’re going to talk about phase two, when they don’t show up. When you get no-shows for your consults.

I love talking about this. I’m so excited today. My energy is good. Alright, so here’s how I thought that this could be fun to do it is I chose one of the Ask a Coach that I actually personally responded to and so I wanted to share their coaching request, how I coached them, then I’m also going to do a second layer of if I had multiple sessions to coach them, this is where we would have taken the next one.

And instead of just sharing it with them, I’m going to share it with all of you so everybody can benefit. And we’ll talk about the priority line of troubleshooting and then how to troubleshoot those things. So you ready? Let’s dive in.

So this is one of the no-show coaching requests that we received. So the coach said, “Today I had another no-show on a consult call. That makes five out of seven no-shows on my booked consult. I want to fix this problem, but I need help please.” He or she, I can’t remember, wrote a model on their problem.

So they said that the circumstance was five to seven consults booked and they couldn’t reach the person over the phone, and then the thought was I want to fix this, and then their action – and we’re going to talk about this. I’m actually going to break down the way that they problem-solved this later on, but their action is they posted in 2K to hear if other people do it differently.

They investigated the precise messaging in their automated follow up emails and they coached themselves on being attachment-free when they don’t show up. And then the result they’re trying to create is that they’re fixing the problem. And then they ask me if I had any ideas.

So this is the coaching that I gave them. Are you ready? Take a second and think about what you think the problem is and the solution is. Five to seven no-shows on booked consults. If someone gave you this coaching, if this was you coaching yourself, how would you approach this? Just think about it for a second.

Enough of the thinking. Just going to give you my thoughts. So here’s the coaching I gave this person. What if this wasn’t a problem? Two people showed up. What happened with those consults? If you had signed both of those, would the problem seem as big? Although of course we want people showing up on consults, what we want more is selling the people who do.

When I was pitching, sometimes I would get 20 people to my show. And when I greeted them, 15 would walk off immediately and five would stay. How I reacted determined the result of the people who did stay. If I made it a big problem and my energy dropped and I lost focus, I would sell no one.

If I decided nothing had gone wrong and that I was going to focus on the people who were there and give them all of me, I might sell 15 to five people. So let’s start with those two people. Who did show up? What happened there? Tell me only about how you showed up, what you were thinking, what the result was, and what you learned on your evaluation.

You guys see that? It’s like, total mind shift. From the problem being that five people didn’t show up to my guess is this person didn’t sign the two people who did show up, otherwise there’s no way they would be writing it.

The actual problem is the two people who didn’t sign who actually showed up on consults. It’s a higher phase of problem. You can skip phase two and focus on phase three. They show up and they say no and you can’t overcome their objections. That is actually the phase you want to focus on. It’s the better problem to solve.

If you are getting no-shows, first, before we address that and spend time on it, let’s find out if there are people who are showing up and then just aren’t buying. If you are getting people showing, we need to problem solve for those people not buying first. That is what I want you to come to Ask a Coach with. That is what I want you spending all your energy on.

I focus all of my energy towards the people who show up in my business. In my programs, the people who post the most, they’re the ones who get the most energy from me. They’re the ones that get the most coaching from me. Those are the people I focus on in my programs, the people who are actively engaged the most.

The people I focus on are the people who buy from me. Not the people who don’t. The people I focus on, even on webinars at the end if I’m selling 2K and I’m answering questions and I see the number of attendees going down, I focus on how many people are still there. 200 people might leave and I could tell myself everyone is leaving, or I can say, 600 people are still here and they want to buy.

I learned this art pitching. It was – pitching was just a game of where you gave your attention and focus. And when I put my focus on the people who were right in front of me, the people who were engaged, the people who were participating, that is when I sold the most.

And when I focused on the guy on his phone at the back of the show, or the woman who’s huffing and puffing because she’s got ice cream in her cart, or the six people who left and were like, ugh, demonstration, when I focused on those people, I sold nothing.

I learned that so deeply early on and I carried that into my coaching relationship and I really want to pass that on to you. You’ve got to focus on the people who are there right in front of you. This is just higher quality problem solving.

Okay, so that’s where I want you to put your focus if you do have people showing up. If you don’t, if they’re all no-showing, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the priority line of troubleshooting. The first thing is you want to focus and coach yourself on your reaction first.

Where is your mind? Is it with the people, again, who aren’t showing up and aren’t buying, or is it on the people who you could get to show up? Are you thinking about getting out there and marketing some more, or are you stressing about how they didn’t show up?

I always recommend having something equally compelling to do as a backup every time you schedule a consult, and it should be something that includes meeting people, telling them you’re a life coach, and making offers to help them.

Seriously, I learned this actually in dating. I took this program and one of the things you had to do was you had to schedule dates and then you had to have something equally exciting to do is for whatever reason, like I’ll give you an example. If they say that – you guys schedule a date at 6pm but then he doesn’t confirm with you and it’s 3pm day of and he still hasn’t confirmed with you, by then, you’ve got to make other plans or you have to have other plans and then you go do those other plans.

So if he messages you at five and he’s like, hey, are we still getting together, you’re like, oh sorry, I didn’t hear back from you, I’m doing this other thing. Try again. It keeps you in the sufficient energy. It keeps you from not putting all of your eggs in the basket of this person who maybe found you online, knows nothing about you, and just signed up on a scheduler, which most of you all use that I don’t recommend.

I always recommend interacting with the person directly. In my first year or two, I never had someone sign up with a scheduler. I would tell them to message me or email me. I would personally message them back. I would tell them what three times work for you. Not these are the three times that work for me, none of that fake selling bullshit.

No, I would make myself available for a client. That’s the way I thought about it is like, oh, this is a potential client. This is an important meeting. I will make myself available for you, and then I would make myself available. It’s not that hard.

Anyway, total side note. But I really put the interaction – I didn’t put anything in between me and the person. But if they did not show up, I just had something else to do that was focused on finding more people to sign up for consults. That’s the first thing I want you to check.

If all of your people are no-showing and you don’t have any consultations to evaluate and to get coaching on and to figure out what went wrong there, you’ve got to figure out where your brain and your reaction is, and it’s just very telling that you’re like, it’s totally fine and you’re ready to go do this other thing that you had scheduled if this person doesn’t show up, then you know that your brain is forward, future, money-focused versus past-focused on what could have been, what should have been.

That’s where you want to just be coaching yourself. So until you get this process on repeat in your mind, until you understand that the money is in focusing on finding where people to sell to and then selling to those that show up, you might have some drama.

So here’s how you’re going to navigate the drama if you have it. You can’t shove it down or ignore it. So if you have it, I want you to ask yourself, why is this a problem? What are you making this mean about you, about your audience, about your ability to make money?

And check everything that doesn’t end in nothing. It means nothing. I really want you to hear this from me right now. It means nothing. People quit. This is what they do. Y’all sometimes think that quitting doesn’t happen to me, that we don’t get no-shows. Of course, we do.

We have 2000 people sign up for a webinar, only 1000 people show up. It’s like 50%. Sometimes it’s less than that. Sometimes like 20% show up. We might have 5000 people register and 1000 people show up. If we have 50 people sign up for 200K, five quit before we ever get started.

We just spend no time thinking about it. None. We give zero energy to it. Even the people who might ask for a refund in 2K, we don’t get that many to be honest, but I don’t even know about them when we do. My team just handles it. I spend zero time thinking about the people who don’t show up for themselves, who don’t show up for the coaching.

I don’t think about the people in 2K who aren’t engaged. I don’t think about the people who don’t read my emails. I was even coaching someone recently in 2K on this where they had done this exercise to clean out their emails and they had sent this email and said like, if you haven’t scheduled a consult, something about getting them off their email list.

And it was really trying to engage the people that they did want to talk to, but I was like, I just never think about the people – I’ve never cleaned out my email list. We’ve literally never done that.

You will hear podcasts and courses and processes for getting people off your list that don’t engage because it makes your open rate or your delivery rate slightly higher. I spend no time thinking about that. And I have a six-million-dollar business at this point. No time. So clearly it hasn’t mattered. It hasn’t made that big of a deal to the bottom line.

No time. And it’s always been this way. Even when the numbers were missing a few zeros, even when 20 people registered for my webinar and five people showed up. Even when no one was – I had no consults on the books for three months and one person signed up and then didn’t show up.

Even when the numbers were as small as yours, I still – remember, I did this when I was pitching so I just always did this. This is what I know to be true about selling. And you just really have to understand that people flake, they ghost, whatever you want to call it, they don’t honor their word, they quit. It happens.

And yes, it happens a lot. Maybe even five out of seven times. I love this person that doesn’t know they volunteered for their coaching to be on the podcast. But I really want you guys to think about how many people do you think go into an Audi dealership and look versus buy. Probably five out of seven.

Seven people come in and look and two buy. When people sign up for consults, they’re just having a look. That’s it. And some turn around and leave before you even get a chance to greet them. The real issue is your attachment and insufficiency around it.

Think about the Audi guy. It’ll help to get out of the coaching industry and yourself. Maybe he hasn’t sold a car all month. But what happens when he focuses on the five people who came in and left empty-handed? What happens when he starts stressing and problem solving and questioning? Think about his energy when somebody else walks in the door.

You want your energy to be ready when that buyer walks in. I’ve been waiting for you all day, I’m ready to serve you, excited for you to be here, and I’m going to focus only on you. I’m filled up, and now I’m here to serve. You want to be in that place and ready when that person reaches out to you, and you don’t know when they’re going to reach out to you, so you’ve got to be ready all the time. The only people who matter are the ones who walk through the door.

I feel like this podcast is going to be revolutionary. Okay, my Ask a Coach coaches have been like, “Stacey, you’ve got to do a podcast on no-shows. Here we are.

Now, after you’ve done your work to clean up your mind, if you do have people showing up, you want to focus on solving your selling problem. You always want to focus on selling over marketing because you don’t need to have a ton of consults to close the people you do get.

So, if this coach had closed the two people that did show up, and maybe sell them – he or she, I can’t remember – selling a $5000 package he or she made $10,000. If one person buys an $80,000 Audi, it doesn’t matter that five looky-loos came in. That’s what we’re going to call the no-shows. Can we call the no-shows, from now on, the looky-loos? Those are my favorite.

I get really mad and I always bitch to Neil about the looky-loos who drive through our neighborhood because we are two and a half miles back in our neighborhood, and it’s like, the speed limit is already 25, and so if you get a looky-loo, which happens a lot because the houses are very beautiful and there’s beautiful lakes, I get it, but don’t drive 15 miles an hour through my neighborhood when I have a 2.5 mile drive behind you. These are the calls Neil gets. I’m like, what’s happening? Alright, let’s call them the looky-loos. That’s all they’re doing. They’re looky-looing. That’s what people do. It’s not a problem.

So, your selling is always going to be a bigger problem than your marketing. So, you can get 1000 people through the door, and if you can’t sell any of them, it doesn’t matter. So yes, I want you to focus on the one person who showed up and how you sold them and why you didn’t buy. And I want you to put all of your energy into them, even in 999 people scheduled consults and didn’t show up. That’s how serious I am about this concept. Focus on the one, not the 999 other people. Focus on the selling problem first.

Then, after you’ve done that, you’ve cleaned that up and you’ve signed that one person out of 999 other people that didn’t show up, then you focus on the marketing problem. And I’m going to use this coach who wrote in as an example to teach all of you about evaluating the problem. So, we’re going to break it down.

So, the way that they were going to solve the problem was they said this was their plan. They were going to post in 2K to hear about if other people do it differently. They’re going to investigate their messaging in their automated follow up emails and they’re going to coach themselves on being attachment-free when they don’t show up. It’s a pretty good plan, definitely the last one, coach yourself on being attachment-free, 100%.

And in fact, I want the coaching to be more precise about just being attachment-free. I don’t want you to coach yourself out of it every time. I just want you to be there in your brain before they don’t show up. Be there so when they do show up, it doesn’t affect it because you are there so often.

But here’s what I want to offer. None of this is about thinking about why your client isn’t showing up. Their model. This is why learning clean selling is so important. You will learn that when you join 2K. But for those of you that are in 2K, when you have this happen, you want to go back to clean selling and you want to think about their models. There’s an actual module, thinking about their thoughts, thinking about their models.

You want to be there. You want your brain to be clear and you want to be thinking about them. When you are thinking about you, you have no capacity to full on problem solve what is happening in their brain. None of this is investigating what you are thinking about the client between sign up and show up and how that showed up in their experience.

So, again, even though it’s thinking about you, it’s still thinking about you, but only as the circumstance to them, the contributor to their experience. So, I used to do that pitching. I used to think about, what must the show have been like for them, when I was thinking one of these people are going to buy, or whatever the scenario was?

And so, I actually recently coached someone in, I think it was in 2K. The days, the programs, they all run together. Someone I was coaching recently, one of the things I was asking is did you send emails in between and what were those emails? What did you say to that the client to prepare them and what thought was driving the energy to which you prepared them for the call? What was in your marketing, the language, the energy, the intangible things that were impacting the client that you might not even realize that were creating the result?

This particular client I was coaching, as it turns out, they were like, “I send three reminder emails. I send them 48 hours, 24 hours, one hour.” And I asked them what they were thinking that had them sending three reminder emails. And I want you to think about, if you are someone that sends a lot of reminder emails, or any reminder emails, what are you thinking about your client when you do that?

In the content of those emails, are you teaching them that their brain is going to want to flake? Are you telling them the importance of showing up? Are you talking to them like a schoolteacher? Are you assuming it’s going to be tempting for them to blow it off? Who is this person who just signed up for a consult?

And with this case of the other coach I was coaching, clearly it wasn’t someone that they thought was mature, responsible, and excited. And I taught them, in this coaching session, the difference between reminder emails and value emails. The difference between, “You might not show up, so I had to get you to show up by harping on you and reminding you to show up,” versus, “You’re totally going to show up, you’re amazing. And this is too good not to show up. Here’s so much more goodness to get you salivating.”

Their model, if you’re sending them all these reminder emails thinking that they’re going to flake and they’re not going to take it seriously and they’re not going to show up responsibly, their model might be, when they get these reminder emails, this is going to be a high-pressure sales situation. Look at these emails already. Look at all these reminders I’m getting. This person is serious about selling me. Maybe I don’t want to get on this type of sales call.

That might be their legitimate thought, versus I was telling this client that I was coaching that I, when I do webinars, what I do is when they sign up, actually I keep it really simple. I send my list all the same stuff, so they get the reminder emails and everything, even if they’ve already signed up.

Once we send an email and we announce a webinar, every email after that. Even as we get to the one hour before, we still have reminder emails, but all of them are value and excitement-based, designed to compel the person to want to show up, just like get them so excited that they’re literally salivating and they can’t help but show up. It’s like, this is going to be so amazing. Let me give you all of the examples of why it’s going to be so amazing. Let me give you more value. Let me excite you even more. Let me show you, not tell you, show you that this is going to be the most exciting thing you did all week.

That’s what I spend my time doing. And I think about the people who are going to be the best participants, the most engaged, the most excited, and get the most out of it. And that’s who I write to in all of the emails. Not the people who are going to schedule something else and not make it a priority and have kids pulling on them the whole time and be doing the dishes while they’re listening. I don’t think about those people.

But I really want you to check, where is your brain when you’re marketing to your clients, when you’re getting people on consults, and where are you in between? This is even the same for when people say yes and they haven’t paid yet. We talk about this all the time in 2K, the space between when people say yes and pay. New coaches are always freaking the eff out in this time between, “They said they were going to pay in 24 hours and they didn’t,” and they’re stressing, checking their Stripe or their PayPal.

They are hyperventilating, on pins and needles, holding their breath. Versus, I would just decide they’re paying. Of course, they’re paying. And then, I would go out and keep meeting people and telling them I’m a life coach and making offer to help them. And if they didn’t pay, it was fine because I had done so much work between the time they said yes and the time that they didn’t pay that I already had more consults. So, it didn’t even matter.

I really want you to consider that it’s possible that the people that don’t show up, that they could just not matter. It could just not impact your bottom line or your results. The people who don’t show up, the people who can’t overcome objections – I coached someone recently in 2K about this. I’m like, yeah. What if it’s not a problem, you can’t overcome objections? Find people who don’t have them.

And then, of course, she was like, “Actually, all of my clients who signed up with me, they didn’t have objections.” And she’s made, I don’t know, $50,000, $60,000 this year. And I’m like, “So, clearly it doesn’t matter that you don’t know how to overcome objections, right?” What if that doesn’t matter

What about the people who say yes and then ghost or the people who say yes and then they quit after like two sessions, or the people who quit after six months? None of that has to matter if you’re doing the right things in the in between, if you’re getting out there and meeting people, telling them you’re a life coach, making offers to help them. You could do that so much it never matters when people quit, it never matters when people don’t show up because there are always more people to sell.

I hope you enjoyed this podcast as much as I enjoyed recording it. It was so much fun for me. Alright, have a beautiful week. Get to meeting people. Get to tell them you’re a life coach. Show them that you’re a life coach, in all of you, in how you show up to the world. And then make offers all of the time to help everyone. I love you guys so much. I’ll see you in 2K.

Hey, if you are ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2K for 2K program, where you’re going to make your first $2000, the hardest part, and then $200,000 using my proven formula. It’s risk-free. You either make your 2K or I give you your 2K back. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.