Ep #267: Launch Zeros

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 267. How are you doing today? So I just came off of the 200K mastermind and Two Million Dollar Group live event. We call it Advanced Selling Live, three in-person days and then Two Million Dollar Group. We have a fourth day where we’re in-person together masterminding. I teach on stage. There is networking and strategy and mindset. And I’m always bringing the best of everything I’ve learned cumulatively with every class I’ve ever done for both groups.

And really applying the teachings to both the 200K students and the Two Million Dollar Group students at the same time. It’s so much fun. It was really an incredible event, hands down, the best event I’ve ever done. It was so good. And today I’m going to share with you one of the things that we talked about on stage that was not part of our main presentation, but it became really relevant to everyone in the room.

And so I thought I would share it with you all today with a caveat of, my energy is a little low. My whole family got the stomach flu the last day, the day of the Two Million Dollar Group. And we have been sick ever since for a week straight. It has been so insane. I don’t have the stomach flu since, I don’t know, I was a kid. What, who gets the stomach flu? It’s been awful. So my energy’s a little low, but I really wanted to get this episode to you today because I know so many of you can benefit now. You need this message to move forward in 2024.

So one of the main teachings, main stage days that we spent was at the very first day, the entire morning session. We really dove into everyone in the room’s expectations at the beginning of 2023. The way they imagined that year was going to go, how it actually went, which was for many of us, a really painful either personal year, professional year, or both, not everyone, but many people. And then how we’re going to move forward and the mindset that is really powerful in moving forward.

And really I kind of talked about my own experience of recovering from a really hard year and things that I had noticed that were happening for me that weren’t happening for other people who had a hard year as well. And an energy that I was embodying that I wasn’t seeing other people embody and why I thought that was. And there are many things I taught. And I’m going to teach a couple of them over the podcast over the next few weeks.

But one of them is really, truly at the most simplest, at the core and the most simplest way is the ability to recover from failure and to learn from it. And to learn from it so deeply that it actually energizes you and you see the value of the fail. Seeing the value of the fail and what it will bring to you in the future, the value it will return to you from the lessons you learned.

Seeing that and knowing that so deeply in your bones that it changes you and makes you become a different human that is more valuable because you failed. That will energize you, that will excite you, that will put you back in your power. That will give you very clear direction for how to move forward if you have really, truly learned from failures, mistakes, everything. It really launches you onto a different trajectory. See, this is where you all are going to have to bear with me. What’s happening in my brain, all the words, they’re gone.

So this is the way I wanted to talk to you all about this today. I wanted to talk to you about this through the lens of launch zeros. I’m going to tell you what that is. But if you’re not launching, I’m also going to tell you how you can apply this to your situation. But what I’m seeing, one of the things that we do in 200K is for the first time, people, once they sell out and fully book their one-on-one practice, they typically start going into group.

And so in 200K we really teach kind of how to transition from one-on-one into group. What it’s like to sell your first group. What you have to be thinking about one-on-one and group and the mindset you have to have. the way you have to present your group to your people who have been buying one-on-one from you. And then when you start selling group, you move into Two Million Dollar Group, then you really start learning how to scale that and start selling only group and then even from there, things like programs and memberships.

And inevitably in this period where you’re learning to launch and you’re launching groups for the first time. You’re going to have what I call, some launch zeros, which means you do an entire launch and nobody buys. In the pitching world, when I was selling slicers and knives and mops and dicers, we called this blanking. I don’t know why. The only thing I can imagine is kind of like shooting a blank out of a gun, nothing happens, nothing comes out. I honestly don’t know and I never thought to ask, which is so weird.

For seven years we would write, if you had a zero, you wouldn’t write zero, you would write blank. And then you would call and be like, “I just blank.” I don’t know, it’s the weirdest thing. Never thought to question that terminology, but that’s what we would call it. And it was very common. It was very common, if you’re doing 10 shows a day, five to seven days a week, week after week after week, year after year after year, you get into stores where it’s early in the morning, there’s no one in the store.

The intercom isn’t great and people can’t hear your announcement or you said it too fast or you didn’t say it with the right energy. And people ignored you for thousands of reasons literally, so many reasons. You would either have no one show up, which was even worse almost than just not selling and/or you would do an entire 20 minute show and no one would buy at the end. And this would happen if your audience size was three or four people or 100 people, it didn’t matter. There was always a chance for you to sell nothing at the end of the show.

And we were on 100% commission. So I just want to tell you for seven years straight, I do know what it feels like to put a lot of effort into something and make zero dollars. And I have talked about this before in my teachings and in the podcast. There were many stores where I would go in for an entire week and every day would be zeros, zero, zero, zero, really, really tough. Knowing that you’re working for an entire week, possibly paying for a hotel room, for your meals, all of that and not getting paid basically at all.

So the way it worked is, they were required even though you were contractors, to pay you minimum wage if, I think at the end of the month if you didn’t average minimum wage which I always averaged minimum wage. If you took four weeks out of the month, I could have zeros for two of those weeks and I would still have been above minimum wage for the other two. So it really did feel, I don’t know, I’m just not getting paid. I never had a time where I got actual backup money.

Have you ever served? It’s like when you serve a table, a giant party of 15 people and they just decide not to tip you. They’re like, “No.” And you add gratuity and then they’re like, “No. You’ve got to take that off. I’m not paying that either.” And you just make no money off of all of that effort. I really do understand what that feels like. And I have experienced, I think we’d established that maybe this round is my 11^th 200K mastermind round.

And I don’t remember how many of the Two Million Dollar Group I’ve done, but because we used to meet twice for every mastermind that we did, it feels like I’ve been doing that one for just as long. And so I’ve coached hundreds of people through launch zeros, and that is not uncommon. And it’s also not something that is unique to 2023. However, a lot of people did experience more than usual launch zeros in 2023. And a lot of people who experienced them, were people who have not necessarily had that problem before.

So these are people that are making $700,000 in their business and they did a launch expecting to do at minimum 200K, 100K, they weren’t even doubtful that that would happen. It wasn’t even in their radar even if they were being strategically pessimistic, there was nothing that told them there was going to be a zero coming and it was a zero.

Then I had people who were in the two or three or $400,000 range who maybe have done launches, but they don’t have their launch stamina yet and their consistency with selling all the time. So maybe they’ve had better launches than others, but they’ve never had a zero and they would have a zero. Well, really I would say whether you’re newer or you’re making 700K, it’s still really scary and really painful. The idea that you could put in tons of effort and just nobody buys.

We’re going to talk about when you sell not zero, but a little less, if it’s just one or two or three or four people into your group. That’s also really, really painful. But I mean, I’ve seen even multi-millionaires canceling launches in 2023. And having to either relaunch or refund people, canceling a program altogether and just not running it because there weren’t enough people. So it was a lot more common from a perspective of it’s always common when you’re learning how to launch, you’re going to have lower launches or potentially zeros.

It was more common in people who were experienced in launching last year, where it was also happening. And so in one of these conversations that I was coaching, and I had this, by the way, it happened to me when I was starting launching too. And I have also, even at the multi-million dollar level, had launches dramatically underperform based on what we expected. So I just again want to keep reiterating, people think I’m the sales queen and this stuff never happens to me. I’m always teaching you from integrity, from a place of I have experienced what you are experiencing.

So I’m coaching one of my students in Two Million Dollar Group who is a very high earner. And she had put the most energy that she’d ever put into doing a launch. Had all of her materials done ahead of time, scheduled everything to go out. Was so proud of the proper well thought out planning that she had done in advance and then the level of execution for the launch that she had done. It was the best launch she had ever done on the back end, less messy than any launch ever before, and it was a zero.

And she was getting her coaching and she said like so many of the other launches, “I put so much less effort in and I made so much more money and I’m so deflated, basically that I put all this extra energy in and I really knocked it out of the park as far as my planning and my execution of it. And my being able to be present to watch the launch and to do troubleshooting, and yet none of it mattered.” And she said, “I wish I just would have known, I’m fine taking the zero, I just wish I would have known in advance because I wouldn’t have put all that work into it, I would have done something else.”

And I asked her this question, which is a very interesting question. I said, “Is that true?” And she was originally like, “Well, yes, obviously. What? There’s no other option. There’s no other answer. Who else would answer, “I’d be so glad to do the work for nothing?”” But here’s why I asked her this question, and here’s what I told her in the coaching. I said, “There is winning or learning.” That’s what my coach told me in my first scale, my first attempt to scale when I went from 325,000 to 860,000, the thing she told me when I was failing miserably at every webinar that I did, “There is winning or learning.”

And every launch I did that entire year my goal was 50 people in a launch and I would do 12, 14, 20. I think the most I ever did was 26 or 30. But just nowhere in the ballpark, 16 and we weren’t even remotely in the ballpark of where I was trying to be. So she told me, “There is winning.” So this is what I told my client, “The next piece of that there is winning or learning is you don’t win or learn from not doing anything. You get your time back but you don’t get advancement.” What? And I really want you guys to think about that.

And I think I’ve even said this maybe on the podcast in episodes prior, but I really want you to think about it from this context. If you’ve done a launch and you’ve sold nothing and it feels awful, such a waste of your time and your energy. And you wish that you could have had all that energy back, you’re missing the point. You can always get your time back but you don’t get advancement, you don’t get to grow, you don’t create value. The value is created in the learning. So we win, we get what we want or we learn.

Now, we think, I’m still going to be making money while I learn, but sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you learn and you take a loss in that learning, that happens. You put a month or two’s worth of effort and energy into a launch, and no one buys. And it’s the worst feeling. I fully acknowledge that. But there is a beautiful opportunity that you get no matter what the result is from every launch you do and that is learning.

Learning about you, learning about your beliefs, learning about your strategy, learning about your marketing, learning about your selling, learning about your clientele. Learning about overall how you put together your launches, learning about the marketplace. There’s so much learning that happens and you miss all of it if you get lost in the defeat, if you tell yourself it was a waste of time or energy, if you wish it away, that you wish you hadn’t done it, you lose all of it.

Sometimes the learning that you will do from that zero is just coming to terms with finding sufficiency in, finding your capability to endure a zero because it’s often our biggest fear is, I’ll do all this work for nothing. That’s what our brain loves to tell us over and over and over. I’m going to do all this work and nothing will happen. And finding that place where I did all this work and I got nothing and I didn’t die and my business kept going, finding the recovery from a zero. Those moments can be some of the most powerful things you ever do.

When I would go up and do a zero and then troubleshoot afterwards and get back up. And maybe sometimes I would do three or four in a row, but when I would finally figure out what it was and get back up and do a show and sell 10, 20 on the next one, there was something about that. It’s the confidence that it created in me to be able to get back up from a zero and to know I could just sustain zeros all the time and then I could still sell 20 the next one. That is what made me the best in the entire industry is the zeros didn’t get in my head so much that I couldn’t recover.

Where I would see some people who would go on zero streaks and then quit and literally leave their job. They were like, “I can’t handle it.” But what made me the best is I was like, “I can handle this and I can figure it out.” And that made me so powerful because I could go into any store, in any chain selling any product anywhere in the country and I believed I can figure this out. How do you create the belief, I can figure this out? How do you create that without testing that a million different ways, without having solved a million different problems?

And I know I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but I would call for what we called adjustments. So if you’re in 2K for 2K or if you’re in 2K Mastermind or any of my programs really, you’re going to be doing evaluations and we do those a couple of ways. So there is what worked, what didn’t work. What am I going to do differently? And being very specific about that. And then there’s also what are my top three theories as to what I think went wrong? Or getting your people talking and hearing it from them.

But every time I would call for an adjustment, we would isolate where we lost people. We would isolate what we thought was the biggest problem. And then we would come up with what we thought based on their behavior, was the solution moving forward and then go out and try it. We used to call pitching an art for this reason because we were doing this for live humans. They weren’t robots, so live humans with different personalities in different parts of the country with different levels of communication, different levels of income.

And it was really an art to figure out how you needed to communicate to people and what you needed to do. It was the same script every time. It was the same motions every time. But your energetic connection, how you connected to people, the way you said things, how fast you did the show, how slow you did the show, how many pauses you did, how dramatic you were, how matter of fact you were. There were so many components up for grabs of just learning the people in the store. And so that’s what we would do.

We would just theorize on the call and then I’d go out and try it. And then we would see the result it created and we would see how the crowd would behave. And then I would get on the phone again and be like, “Okay, this is what they did and this is what I did and this is how it went. Now we’re going to try this next thing. We’re going to isolate this thing over here.”

I mean, it would come down to, literally line by line, sometimes of the entire 20 minute show of this is where it was. This is where I didn’t believe that you believed yourself. This is where you lost connection. This is where you did this thing or said this thing robotically, whatever it was. Sometimes it was actual circumstantial things that happened. Managers coming into the middle of the show with a cart full of returns, “Hey, I have these 30 returns for you. Where do you want me to put them?” “Oh, yeah, ma’am, I’m in the middle of a show right now with a live audience, can you catch me after?”

Sometimes it was that. What would you do if that happened? How would you handle that next time? Sometimes it was the silliest things like that. It did not feel silly at the time, whatever it was. When I first started launching so much of it was, are people opening my emails? Are they reading them? Can I get them talking? What are they saying? What questions do they have? Did I send enough emails? Do I need to give enough notice ahead of time?

We have an entire training on troubleshooting launches in 200K Mastermind with so many different things it could be. So many different opportunities for getting better. So many things you might have not realized or not planned ahead for or not tried. So many different ways to look and see what happened. I really think the biggest challenge of launches in the beginning is getting people engaging and getting people talking. And to find the energy to pull people in and get them engaging and opening up and talking is so powerful. That’s the lesson. That’s the work.

But the recovery, the going from a zero to not a zero, that’s what makes you believe in your stamina, your ability to withstand all things that come your way in your business, every time it happens. And if you don’t launch, what happens is you don’t have conversations with your people, you don’t try out sales emails and marketing emails, you don’t try out webinars, you don’t try anything. And so you don’t get that feedback from anything. And so then you don’t have any theories as to what happened because you did nothing. You don’t have what worked.

You don’t have what didn’t work and you have no plan for what you would do differently. You have a zero anyways because you didn’t launch. Yes, you have free time, but I want to offer for you all that free time should not be the metric, especially if you’re building your businesses and you’re not at the multiple millions of dollars. Free time probably shouldn’t be the thing you’re looking for. It should be lessons learned in entrepreneurship. That’s what I’m accumulating. Free time is the result you get from the accumulation of all of the lessons learned.

Now, one of the things that I have been talking about, and I talk about on stage, what keeps people, this is our biggest fear is that if I do a zero, I’m going to keep getting zeros, my offer is over. No one wants my offer. This is done. I have to just cancel this for eternity. What keeps people getting zeros, meaning you do a zero and then you get another zero or what keeps you from having bad launch after bad launch after bad launch is two simple things.

You didn’t figure out the problem and then go solve for it. You didn’t land on the correct problem or you didn’t do any troubleshooting at all and solve for anything and/or you didn’t recover from it emotionally. And that’s typically the big one that I see. I just coached someone today, a different student in my Two Million Dollar Group and I could just tell her confidence was so down from her previous fails. And because of that, she was bringing that energy into another launch. And once again it wasn’t performing the way that she wanted.

And it was really stacking up on her fear and her confidence of where her business is going and her ability to make a lot of money this year. And recovering from it emotionally has a couple of components to it. One of them is being able to make peace that it happened, find sufficiency that it happened, okay-ness that it happened. And then losing the fear of future zeros, finding so much okay-ness that you no longer fear the zeros. And how you know you’ve recovered is what I said in the beginning, where you have energy and excitement and you look forward to trying again.

If you don’t look forward to trying again and from a place of, I’ll be okay if it’s another zero, but I want to get the next attempt out there so I can get more information, more feedback and learn more. If that’s not the place you’re in, it means you didn’t recover from it emotionally. If you don’t have a very specific indication of what you’re going to do differently, if it doesn’t feel clear, the top three problems and exactly how you’re going to solve them. You probably didn’t figure out the problem correctly and solve for it.

And still sometimes you can post three theories. You can do your, what worked, what didn’t work, what you’re going to do differently. You can be very specific about that. You can go out there and it still doesn’t work. It doesn’t mean that anything’s gone wrong. It just means your theories were wrong in the beginning. And so many times that happened.

I remember one store, I don’t even remember where I was, but I just remember that I made no money that entire week. Actually this happened a couple of times, but the one I’m thinking of, I didn’t make any money until the last day. There was also one where I made no money until the last show of the last day. So I literally made no money. But in this one I called for adjustments every single day.

I was one of the top salespeople. And then this other trainer was one of the top salespeople, and we both had our heads on this store, trying new things every single time and it wasn’t cliquing, it wasn’t working. And after trying probably 100 things, I remember the trainer, I don’t even remember what it was, but he just threw out something silly and ridiculous and was like, “Try this.” And I did it and it worked. And we were like, “What the hell?” And then what’s so interesting is I would walk away from these situations with, I had different names for the styles of pitches that I developed from trying new things out.

One of the stores, I remember, this is when I had actually found coaching and I was listening to Grant Cardone. He has a book called Seller Be Sold back when he was sales coaching, this was years and years ago. And he had said something about people have to know the value ahead of time, so he would always tell his prices ahead of time. I don’t necessarily agree with that 100% for many reasons that I won’t get into here. So we would tell the price at the end and as soon as I pulled the product out, they would walk away.

And I just happened to be on this chapter in the audio where he said, “They have to know the value, otherwise they will devalue it in their own brain.” And I thought, you know what? I’m going to try this where I just tell them the price in the beginning. So I would pull it out and I would say, “This is going to sell for $69.99 when you see it again in the store. Let me show you quickly how it works.” And then I could see people’s brains just looking at it like, oh, my gosh, this very cool product, super exclusive. And then when I would cut the price their eyes would get so big and they would get so excited and I started selling like crazy.

And so I would call that the price ahead of time pitch. But I had so many different ones in my toolbox from all the different stores where no one was buying, and I would finally figure it out. So the fastest way out of launch zeros is figuring out exactly what happened. Staying in the problem solving instead of going into the despair and the gloom and the doom and the fear and the overwhelm and the disappointment. If you can stay with the problem solving, and if you can do that, I’ll add an extra layer.

If you can stay in the problem solving with maintaining your belief in your demand. So for me, if I have a launch that doesn’t sell, if I had a zero. I’ve talked about this on the podcast many times. But in 2022, I think at the end of 2022, we did a launch for 200K and it did so horribly. But I believe in my demand and I know what we typically sell so well that I was like, “You all, something is really wrong. You have to figure it out.” The whole three days. We’d typically get, I don’t know, 40 applications a day and we were getting four a day.

And I was like, “You all, this is not my selling. This is not the emails. This is not anything. There is something wrong. We’ve got to find it.” And on the third day I got a phone call and it was, “Yeah, so they accidentally excluded the entire wait list for 200K.” Meaning every single person who had raised their hand to say, “I want to buy from you, all of our students”, we figured it out. I think my team figured it out when one of our students was like, “Listen, I’m not getting any of these emails. Are you doing a launch?”

And when the person had said, “Are you doing a launch”, we were like, “Wait a minute, hold on.” So it turns out all of our current students, everyone that had been waiting to apply, none of them got emails. And so they thought maybe the launch had been canceled. Many of them just didn’t reach out to ask until the third day when we were like, “This is the problem.” But because I had my belief in my demand, I didn’t spend three days freaking out and no one’s going to buy from me, and 200K is over and people hate me and just being so disappointed and crying the whole time.

My brain always has freak out. My brain was for sure going to worst case scenario and how I was going to solve for that and what we were going to do moving forward. But for the most part I was like, “But I’m also just sure, something’s wrong. Something is not working in the launch.” I was like, “Check your delivery stats. Check this, check that.” We were checking everything. There’s something powerful about the way you problem solve when you believe the problem is not that people don’t want your offer. When that stops being where your brain goes, the problem solving automatically increases.

I told 200K at the live event, I said, “My go to belief when people don’t buy is that I just communicated it wrong. I missed something in the communication. I missed an objection they had. I overcomplicated the communication. I wasn’t clear. There was an element where people felt left out or they felt like they weren’t sure if it was for them.” But it’s always, I did something. I missed something. It’s never, they don’t want this offer. It’s never, there aren’t enough people watching me. I don’t have enough people on my list. It’s never that.

My brain never goes there, there’s just not enough people on my list. Not enough people want this offer. None of that. It’s so un-useful. There’s a very small percentage of time when that could actually be true. But for most of you, your brain sets goals that are actually obtainable for where you are right now, meaning the exact audience you have right now for 2024, whatever your goal is, you have the audience size that you need right now without growing it at all to hit that goal.

If you don’t believe that, that’s another thing. Work on your belief, question that. From coaching thousands of coaches what I can tell you is it’s rarely, if ever, via access to humans interested in what you have to offer. Maybe in the very beginning, definitely not once you’re launching and in higher levels of income. But even in the beginning, we always mis-underestimate the amount of access we have to people in our networks that would be interested in coaching. And they’re not showing up because of our confidence level, not because they’re not interested.

So I never go to, they’re not interested. I always go to, I didn’t do something. And my problem solving is always really high, that’s the fastest way to get out of launch zeros is just to stay with the problem solving. And you just can’t do this when you spend a lot of time recovering, picking yourself back up. Now, it’s okay if that’s what you need to do. I’ve never not allowed myself to do that, to pick myself back up and to take time to recover. I’ve never not allowed myself to do that.

But the point is to get better and faster at recovery so that you can get into the problem solving quicker. If I know that I’m failing, now, I’m at the point in my business, this is not limited thinking. Some of you are going to hear this, you’re going to want to coach me. You’re going to want to point out my limiting beliefs. It’s not that. I’m at the point now in my business with the level of experience I have, I can typically, I would say 90% of the time, I have a finger on the pulse of how the launch is going to perform before it ever starts, I know.

And I can always give very specific reasons why it’s going to be really good or we need to really prepare. I don’t think this is going to go well or it’s going to go somewhere in the middle. I’m rarely if ever wrong, good and the bad. So that’s why I’m saying it’s not a limiting belief. It’s experience. And I can do it for other people too. So I’m at the point now where if I’m failing now and I am not wallowing in lots of thoughts, typically, if I’m failing, I’m already moving on to the next plan.

I’ve already moved on to the strategy. I’m solving the problem either for now, or if it’s a bigger problem, then for the future. If it’s not solvable in the small time frame that my launch is open, I’m solving the problem before the fail has even fully arrived. And getting myself excited for the learning opportunities and growth that will come before the fail has even arrived.

I’m already in my brain onto the next launch, not in a bad way, not in a way that doesn’t have me seeing the launch all the way through to the finish line, not in a way that has me not giving my full focus and daydreaming about the future. But in a way where I’ve already problem solved so clearly that we already have a plan moving forward. I’m already moving on to new ideas. And I believe it so deeply that I’m already excited to do the next launch. And then it’s just as soon as we close, it’s about implementing the things we learned immediately.

That is the difference of someone who’s making multiple millions of dollars versus someone who isn’t, is that fast recovery period. I have mentioned this on the podcast before, but there’s the five second funeral, sometimes it’s the five second funeral, sometimes it’s the hour funeral. But I remember there were times where it was a two week funeral, took me two weeks to recover. So it rarely takes me that long now. I can’t remember the last time it’s taken me weeks to recover or months to recover. It’s typically a matter of hours or days, and we’re already moving on and moving forward.

This is so powerful. You want to work towards this. I think I’ve said this already on the podcast, but it’s just worth saying again. One of my clients in 200K, someone was talking about this and they were like, “Well, how long do I get to take to kind of take care of myself and get over the disappointment?”

And she had said something along the lines of, “Well, take all the time you need to be with your disappointment and to process your feelings around it. But just know that every second you take to feel disappointed, you’re not moving forward, making money, living your life, running your business and your clients are missing out. You’re missing out.”

And I keep saying it differently each time, but just hit me in a way that it just will stay with me forever. Yes, take the disappointment, take the time to do that. And know that every second you do is a second you’re not moving forward and you’re not going out and serving people and helping people and making a difference. So just decide how long you want to do that. Don’t spend too much time there. Thank you, Lauren Baptiste, current new 200K earner. Such good wisdom there.

And one of the other things you want to do, or you want to pay attention to or be aware of is you want to build your belief in the value that you are accumulating in the fails. The value accumulation from learning, from every fail. When you’re afraid that you’re not learning, and you’re just going to go repeat the same thing over and get the same results, it’s a very miserable process. When you believe you’re going to learn from the fails you’re already moving on to the next one because you want to learn as much as you can. You want to move the needle forward as much as you can.

And how you know that you’re believing in the value that you’re accumulating in your fails, how you know that you are believing in the value that you’re creating with each fail is you’re getting different results. That’s how you know you’re actually getting value. The alternative is, you keep failing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and nothing ever changes. Every time you actually learn from something, you will get a different result. It may not be the result you want, but you will get a different reaction.

For example, when I was pitching, let’s say I would have an audience come and they would walk off as soon as I did the free gift and no one would buy. And that’s at the very beginning of the show. And then I would make an adjustment and then they would stay until I demoed the product or they would leave halfway through the demo. And then I would make another adjustment and they would stay through the demo but leave as soon as I’d started talking about the money.

And then I would make another adjustment and they would stay all the way through the money pitch, but then they still wouldn’t buy. And then I would do another adjustment and they would stay all the way through the end and ask me questions, but still not buy. And then I would do another adjustment and they would stay all the way to the end and ask me lots of questions and then buy. And then they would stay all the way to the end and buy when they’re supposed to buy without any questions. That’s what could happen.

So you will see some sort of progress, it may not be the progress you want for a little bit, but you will see progress. That’s how you know that you’re actually troubleshooting, you’re problem solving, you’re finding the right problems, you’re solving for them. And you’re accumulating value and learning from the fails is, you are getting different results each time you do it again.

For example, if you’re not launching and you just are doing consults. How you get out of a consult purgatory is by evaluating and doing something different every time. And how you know is you start getting slightly different reactions from people. They might say no, but they really believed in the value. Then they might say yes, but they have all these objections or money concerns and then they tell you, “Well, I’d really love to be a yes, but I just can’t.”

Then they say yes, they’re signing up and then they just ghost you and then they say yes and they sign up and they come to the first call and then they change their mind. And then maybe they say, yes, they pay, they come to the first call. They love it. They go all the way through the coaching package. There are different results you will be getting. So if you’re not getting different results, you’re missing something in the learning and it’s your job to figure it out, to figure out what that is.

So the last thing I want to leave you with is what if it’s not a zero, but it’s not a win? The awkward in-between. If you’re doing a launch and your group you want eight people in order to do the launch, a successful launch would be eight people, and you sell one or two or even three or four. I have three things to offer you on this.

Number one, decide what you will do ahead of time. If you’re afraid it could be less than what you want, or if you just want to be strategically pessimistic, if it’s my first launch, if it doesn’t go as well as I thought, what will I do? What’s my number, my minimum to do the group? Is it two people? Is it four people? Is it six? What’s my minimum? And then what will I do? Will I refund them? Will I tell them I’m going to launch again and offer it again and I have to pause it or cancel it?

You never have to give them a reason, but if you’re like, “Actually, we’re going to pause the start date of this group and I’m going to go ahead and you can either keep your deposit on file so that you’re definitely in when we start or I can refund you. What would you like? I’ll let you know as soon as we are going to move forward with the start.” Maybe that’s what you do, run it anyway. Maybe you offer them to do it one-on-one because there aren’t enough people. Whatever it is, you get to decide. But what are you going to do ahead of time?

And then the second thing you need to think about, or you need to know, is that your power in coaching and in sales is your ability to make people feel safe and comfortable, no matter the size of the group. So if you do have three or four people and you decide to move forward, how can you make them all feel like that’s the biggest win possible?

So I gave them an example on stage where I would have three or four people come to my show and I would always say something like, “Oh, my God, you guys are so lucky. Typically we have a lot more people and we’re really pressed for time, but with just us, I’m going to be able to, in the same amount of time that we normally do this demo, I’m going to be able to give you really exclusive access. You can try the machine. You can do this.” I would just make it seem really exciting, like a VIP experience.

I remember and I gave this example at the live event. I was in Fort Knox, a military base, and their Aafes exchange store selling Mr. Sticky, a lifetime guaranteed lint roller. And it was January, a very dead time for them. It had been snowing all week.

I went in that morning and I think it was 10 or 11:00am, whenever, it was an hour after they opened. And the vice president of the entire military exchange stores came through the store and he came up to my booth and he was like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry.” And I was like, “Why?” And he was like, “You’re not going to make any money today. There’s no one in the store.” And I was like, “Oh, I already grossed $1,000 today.” He was like, “What on Earth?” What I had done is, when the store opened, there were five customers, five whole customers in the store. And I went around and I talked to every single one of them.

And I said, “You’re in luck today, we have this really awesome promotion and the store is not very busy. So you get a front row seat. I’m going to make an announcement in just a couple of seconds, but if you aren’t in a hurry, come by, it’s going to be really exciting and we’re only here for a limited time.” And I got all five people to my show. It was these five little old ladies and they were so amazing. So into the show. I took such good care of them. I made them feel VIP. I made them feel special. I made it feel exciting, warm. I didn’t do a big, grand show.

I really tailored it down and made it conversational. I answered their questions that I wouldn’t typically be able to answer. I was able to chat with them longer. And we had this deal where you buy five and you get one free and they all five bought five and got one free. They were like, “We’re buying all of our Christmas gifts early this year.” And the vice president could not believe it. He called the owner of our company that day and asked to book me in every single military exchange store across the country for the entire rest of the year.

So I spent my entire year just going around to military bases, and it was the honor of a lifetime and just so exciting. And it felt like just the biggest confidence boost to have that happen. But that happened because I was willing to make people feel comfortable and special and not weird for being just a couple of them. And you can do that with your groups that don’t sell as much as you thought. You can make everyone feel special. You can tell them all the reasons why it will be more valuable for them, more exciting for them.

And your ability to do that, to create comfort when there’s supposed to be an audience and there isn’t, or there’s supposed to be a big group and there isn’t, your ability to do that. That is literally where your career is.

So the third thing that I want you to know for the awkward in-between is that some of my greatest learnings and the foundation to which my selling skills were developed were those shows that I did for one or three people. Or when I was launching, the groups that really made me be able to manage the energy and create comfort and safety in my group containers and to be able to get people results and keep them engaged, that skill, the foundation of that was developed when I did groups that were a quarter of the size I imagined.

If I imagined 12 and it was four, that’s where my chops were really made. And we used to, when I was pitching, we always used to tell the newbies, “You can’t pitch successfully to 100 people until you’ve mastered pitching to four.” We used to teach them that the people that were touching the stage, just that first layer of people were always your most important buyers. And you made eye contact with them and you did the entire show just to them.

Or what people would typically want to do is if there was 100 people there, they would want to try to perform the show to all 100 people and they’d be pitching to the back. They’d be raising their voice and talking to that person in the back row and it makes sense. We want to make sure everyone’s included. So making eye contact with everyone, talking to everyone in the back row. And every time they did that, no one in the front would buy, no one in the middle rows would buy and maybe that one person in the back that they were talking to would buy.

But when you were focused on the front row and it was just five or six people, you didn’t ignore, but you really didn’t try to just sell everyone. What we would do is say, “Once you know you’ve sold the first front row, they’re actively engaging. They’re nodding their head. They’re very excited about the product. They’re participating in everything you ask them to do, then you move to the next row. You do that until the end of the show, but never forgetting that first row.”

And so what pitching to four people would do is, it made you focus on those four people, that front row, that first row. And if you could get really good at doing that, then when you had 12 more people, you would sell all of those people too. So I want to offer that it’s not a zero, but it’s an awkward in-between of one or two or three or four, your ability to make that a win for people. And to then master comfort and specialness, excitement. To make people feel like they’re so glad they got you when they got you.

Your ability to do that really does make or break your ability to get really, really big in this industry and steward containers of people that are very big with thousands of people. Even when I’m coaching in my 2K for 2K, there might be hundreds of people on that call. But my ability to make that person that I’m coaching in that moment feel like it’s just me and them on the call while also still bringing in the people watching so they don’t feel left out. That’s what makes it so valuable to people.

I’m able to do that because I can coach just one person on a group call, if one person shows up. I had one person show up to my Two Million Dollar Group last round. We didn’t actually have a call and we weren’t doing it that week because we had a live event that week. But for whatever reason it was, I think the live event was on a Friday and our calls are typically on Thursday. I didn’t get the memo and I thought we were still doing the call. So I showed up and one other student showed up and we were like, “What’s happening? Where is everyone?”

And we realized that no one else was coming. And I was like, “Great, you get me for the next hour. Let’s go.” And we had such an incredible session. And she ended up not being able to go to that live event. And she was like, “Seriously, this was the universe, the gods just honoring me and making sure I get what I came for.” And we had the best time and she felt so special. And, that’s it, that’s the meat.

So whether it’s a zero launch, and you’ve got to focus on recovery, problem solving and moving forward and learning and creating value from that fail so much so that you’re glad you did it, even though you didn’t make any money. And then making people feel special and safe and comfortable and excited if it’s the awkward in-between, that is the difference, you all, for this year. You’ve got to be able to do that. You’ve got to work towards that. Get help with that.

You don’t have to have every win to have a successful year if you’re just willing to really rock out those awkward in-betweens and make every single launch worth it and matter and have value from it. By the end of the year you’ll be very surprised at who you’ve become if you do this process. Alright, I hope this was super helpful. I will talk to you next week, bye bye.

Hey, if you’re 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 $2,000 the hardest part using my simple 5 step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.