Ep #118: Selling a Process and Measurable Results

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 118. So, today we’re going to talk about selling a coaching process and measurable results. So, I really want you to consider that it no longer works to sell someone coaching with an ambiguous process or none at all.

As coaching has gone really mainstream – which is such a positive thing – more and more people have life coaches. More and more people know what life coaching is. More and more people are interested in having one. It’s becoming cool to have a life coach. Versus there was a time when people were like, “What is a life coach? I’ve never heard of a life coach. That seems to be for people who don’t know how to live their life, or don’t know how to function.” It’s like, no, everyone has a life coach, right?

So, as it’s gone mainstream, it’s so much easier now to find clients. But the bar is set really high, much higher now, for selling them. Consumers, buyers expect to be told exactly how you will help them. The clearer you are on this piece, the more money you will make.

And I want to offer – we’re going to dive into this. I’m going to give you a couple of examples. But I want to offer that you can do this no matter what coaching school you come from and no matter how you coach, what your process is for coaching.

I will say, one of the things that we are finding at our company now, at my company, is that coaching schools aren’t teaching this. And they’re starting to come to us and say, “This is the one thing that we struggle with, is our students aren’t signing clients.” They’re great coaches, but they’re not signing clients. And of course not. They are selling coaching and it’s really hard to quantify that.

When you’re just selling, “Oh, I’m going to coach you,” your clients are like, “What does that mean?” You can’t assign value to that. So, you need to sell the process of coaching; your process.

Today, we’re going to be diving into this. I have a class I created called Higher Converting Consults and we’re going to really dive into selling a coaching process and how you come up with that process and how you walk your client through that process on a consult call. It’s the basis of the entire class. I’m so excited to deliver this to people.

So, one of the things we were talking about in 2K, one of my clients posted this. I’m actually going to read what my client wrote and then I’ll tell you what my response was to her. But this was really a fabulous question to ask about this – in 2K we call it bridging the gap, but in this part of the consult where you are walking someone through a process and selling them on your process. I thought this was such a brilliant question and I wanted to do an entire podcast around it.

So, my client asked, “I’ve gone through Stacey’s consult module and I’m having a bit of trouble with bridging the gap and how I should present the solution to my client. As an ICF certified life coach, I’m trained to facilitate clients and bring them to their own solutions through questioning style and small actionable plans. I also had a consult today where I think where I went wrong is clearly explaining to them what exactly I do. And the call ended with them thinking they need time to think, plus money, plus talk to their spouse. I believe I didn’t confidently present to them what I do. In the module, Stacey would say she would teach the client so and so and so, so that they could get results. I don’t personally teach or advise the client, so I’m unsure of how to present the solution. My energy was, I’m not sure, and I think that’s why she was not sure either. Your help is greatly appreciated.”

This is so good. So, first of all, I just want to thank my client. I hope I’m pronouncing this right, Raval. I want to thank my client for bringing this question because it is so good. And I know that in 2K we represent hundreds of coaching schools and hundreds of methods. And this really can be done with any client, with any process, whether it’s general life coaching, or specific life coaching.

And really, truly, if you’re not sure what the process is that you’re selling to your clients, the process of getting them what they want, if you’re unsure of what that is, of course your client is going to be unsure about whether to work with you or not. And that will show up in lots of different objections, needing to think about it, needing to ask someone else.

I want you to for sure know 100%. And we talk about this in Higher Converting Consults, and in 2K if you’re already in 2K or if you’re joining 2K. We talk about this a lot, the different types of objections and where they come from. But the one that has someone asking – that they need to run it by their parent or they need to talk to a spouse or they want to run it by their boss, whoever they’re running it by, if they need to run it by someone else, that is your first indicator that they are unsure, 100%.

We want to get somebody else’s agreement because we are unsure. And that agreement, if they say, “Yeah, I think this is a good idea. This will work for you. This sounds good. You should do it…” then they feel more confident to say yes because they have someone else backing them up, whether they succeed or fail.

If they’re thinking, “I might fail,” they for sure want their spouse to have said it was okay so that they’re not having to own the failure on their own because their spouse said it was okay too. They were onboard, right?

It’s really easy to move forward with something you’re unsure about and you’re scared of if someone else is like, “Listen, I’ve got your back. I think you can do this.”

We want to help our clients have their back and know that the decision is the right decision for them. The way we do that is we make sure they are clear on the process that they are going to go through working with us to get to the other side, to literally bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

If they are crystal clear on this, then their feat of failure will be lower because we have lowered the percentage of possibility of failure because we’ve thought of everything. That’s the way that I sell, is literally, “I’ve thought of everything. There’s nothing that you need to worry about me having forgotten.”

There’s nothing you could present to me as a new coach that I’m going to be like, “Yep, you’re right, can’t do it.” Every single thing is in the 2K process – everything – that can ever go wrong, every mistake that could be made, everything you need to learn, factoring in all of the different backgrounds, all of the different people, all of the different starting points.

And I’m talking about even if you have the starting point of, to the coach, “No idea what I’m doing, haven’t changed anything in my life, I have terrible self-confidence, I’m a super-introvert, I don’t have any friends, I don’t have a network, never sold anything in my life, never marketed anything in my life,” we even cover that in 2K for 2K.

We cover that in our process and we have additional trainings. If you’re like, “My money mindset is a mess. I have no money. I have a really hard time asking other people for their money.” We cover that in my Money Mastery course, “I have trouble setting goals and achieving them,” we cover that too. Every single thing is covered.

So, when I present a process, I’m selling you all of these things, literally every step you would need to take to get to the other side. All of a sudden, the fear of failure starts going away because I’ve got you. We’ve laid out such a crystal-clear path that it seems obvious that if I just walk across the path, I will get there. This is why it’s so important.

So, if your client says, “I need to talk to somebody else and present this to them and see how they feel about it, if I need to think about it,” it’s because – I want you to imagine that they’re standing on a mountaintop and they’re looking at another mountaintop and they’re seeing – I don’t know if mountaintop is the right word. It’s like a cliff or whatever. Do you know those wood hanging bridges, like the ones you walk across and they kind of swing and you can’t have a lot of fear of heights, and you have one little…

I’m terrible at explaining this, but I hope you guys know what I’m talking about, where there’s one wood piece and then another and then another and then there’s ropes holding it up and you walk across, and it moves while you’re walking. You guys get the idea.

I want you to imagine, if that’s really, really, really, really high up and the distance between one cliff to the other is really, really, really, really far. And then you look at that wood bridge and you see planks – planks, that’s the word. Okay. We’re getting better y’all. We’re getting there. You see that several planks are missing.

You don’t feel as confident to walk across that bridge. You’re like, “Wait a minute. There’s one missing. Others could be loose. I could fall through. The chances of death are much higher.”

Versus if you see one that has every single plank in there and they all look very sturdy and you see other people going across it and you have someone there saying, “Oh yes, I just walked this path, this exact thing. This is what you’re going to do.” And they’re able to tell you step by step as you are walking across it, right? It’s the power of coaching.

And then, imagine that it’s no longer one of those that’s like swinging with ropes and wood. But it’s an actual concrete bridge. Now you’re like, “Oh, I can definitely do it.” That’s what getting clearer and clearer on your process and how you get someone from A to B, that’s the power of that, of selling that process versus, “Yeah, I’m going to help you get to the other side. We’re going to coach every single week,” and kind of having it be really ambiguous.

Or for my client, what she was saying is, “I ask questions and then I give them little action steps.” It’s like it can’t be that ambiguous, otherwise the client feels like there are things missing from their bridge, their safety net, and they’re going to fall and they’re going to die.

Now, I want to offer that you can do this even if you haven’t gone to a coaching school and you weren’t taught someone else’s process. You can create your own process. You just need to track how you achieve things.

And the only two things that you need to do that are number one, some of your own results to look at. And I want to just say, for many of you who constantly diminish what you have accomplished, the first step to this will be to find out where you have created things and give yourself credit for those things so that then you can break those results down and see how you achieve them.

So many of us say, “Well, I haven’t achieved anything,” which just simply isn’t true. So, that’s number one. And then number two is the willingness to push past your brain’s discomfort around getting specific, past the “I don’t know how I did it.”

You have to really sit down and think about it and your brain is going to want to take shortcuts. I teach with creating intellectual property inside the 200K Mastermind a lot, is like our brains want to assume people know a very basic step when they don’t. Our brains want to skip over the things that we know that are very habitual for us or easy for us.

You have to get it all out. And in the beginning, you’re going to be a little bit more broad. But as you go, you’ll get more and more specific. You have to be willing to take that time to break it down and practice explaining it and saying it clearer and clearer. And whether it’s your own process or someone else’s – so, let’s use the model for example.

If you got certified with the Life Coach School, they teach you a tool called the model. It’s not enough that you learn a process. You have to identify that process, you have to create results with that process, or find results that you’ve created with that process and go to work to create more results with that process and grow your awareness even more for that process sin your own life. That’s the single thing that will make it the easiest to then explain to other people.

When you have trouble explaining it, it’s likely because you either haven’t broken it down enough in your mind and unwound the ambiguity of it, you haven’t tracked it enough. Or you haven’t used it enough.

I see this with a lot of new coaches who are new to the model. It’s hard to explain it, sell it, use it when you haven’t applied it to yourself enough yet. So, that’s all part of the process of selling and coaching with a process. You have to use it on yourself so often that it becomes so easy to explain and you have to track what you’re doing so easy that you know exactly what it is you’re doing. That is what creates you creating your process.

But for any of you who want to think, “Well that’s just not how I coach. I don’t have a process.” I beg to differ. I want you to just consider that you do. You just haven’t sat down to write it out yet.

Even the law of attraction has a process. The most woo of the woos have a process. So, I’m going to read you what I said to my client, what my response was to her.

I told her, 100% that’s why she wasn’t sure. You can’t sell, “I’m going to ask you a bunch of clarifying questions.” You may be doing that. That may be your process, but you can’t sell it like that. I recommend starting with figuring out the last result you created in your life and break it down step-by-step exactly how you did it.

It may look like this. So, I’m going to walk you through this process. And I did a really ambiguous one just for my client and for my 2K students and for this podcast.

So, we’re going to say that the declared desired result of the client – and I did this as her doing this exercise on herself. So, it’s more in the, like, I-language.

Okay, so the desired result is feel more sure of myself. I love this one. It’s so ambiguous; feel more sure of myself. This is how, if I wanted to feel more sure of myself, this is what my process would be.

So, first, I would do an intake for exactly where I am. Take stock of all of my thoughts and feelings and actions associated with the result I am creating now of being unsure of myself. I would create specific markers for how I will know that I have achieved progress.

So, in my mind, when I think about that, being more sure of myself I will be able to make decisions right away, have a process for how I make my decisions, and I’ll treat myself well when I don’t like the outcomes.

Then I would create what I call a change list; what needs to happen for me to make this change? What fails will I have? What new things will I try? And how will I get myself there?

So, this list might look like, for me, wanting to feel more sure of myself, that I will make a decision going with my gut. I will choose thoughts that allow me to feel peace no matter the outcome. I will evaluate after the outcome to see if I love the thinking that created my choice, how the choice played out, and what I might need to factor in next time.

I will tack these steps as I go. I will record them in a journal. I will get coaching to grow my awareness for what drives my decisions and make sure all of my decisions align with that driver.

So, for example, if I want to feel sure of myself, I will see things like I prefer service over aesthetics and I will choose places with better service, even if another place looks cooler or fancier. And then, I will keep going until 70% of all of my decisions – now, I just made that number up, y’all. I will keep going until 70% of my decisions end in outcomes I desire, minus when thing happen that I cannot control.

And then, I will also know that I have arrived when things happen outside of my control or I make a decision outside of my protocol for me, what I have decided, and I will still feel sure of myself.

So, when the end result becomes, “No matter what happens, I feel sure of myself,” whether it’s working a lot and I’m handling it when it’s not working, now I know that I have arrived. That is my measurable result.

And then I told her, “See how I took something really ambiguous and still broke it down?” You have to ask your brain to take the time to do that. I’ve had lots of practice. It’s okay if you have to work towards this. So, this is what I told my client.

Okay, so that was my response to my client. I really want you to notice how I did that with the most ambiguous thing. You really can do that, no matter what your process is. You have to be willing to take the time to do this. we do this all day long in 2K for 2K. We spend a lot of time, I give a lot of examples on bridging the gap. I give them with business. I give them with general life coaching. I give them with weight coaching, something specific.

And you even get worksheets when you join 2K where I have you do this on yourself first many times and then you start doing it with make-believe clients. You think about their problems that you anticipate they may bring or past clients you’ve had, and you go through this process over and over and over.

The better you get at breaking down things into processes, the more it just becomes how you think. At this point, I could just do it with anyone who tells me anything just because it’s now how I think. I’ve had years of practice with this. You have to be willing to do that.

And this is so important, not just for your selling, but for every area of your business. When you are clear on your process, your marketing becomes easier as well because you no longer sit in freeze mode not knowing what to talk about. You always have a topic you can pull from and write or talk about.

You know how to listen for things and filter information that clients give you on consults and coaching calls. You’re listening for what part of the process they’re missing, they’re getting wrong, what they think the process is. You’re narrowing in what you’re listening for, for relevant information and then what becomes just their drama.

And then, when you can sift through relevant information versus drama, your consults will go so much faster, and you command so much energy and so much more power. Your business will stop being this thing that’s unreliable and it will become predictable, even on your consults. You’ll easily be able to predict what problems your clients are going to come to your call with, even if you are a general life coach.

And then, you’ll get better at explaining the solution. Because every time you offer one, it gets clearer and clearer. Every time you tell someone the process, you say it more simply. And the more simply you say it, the more doable it seems.

And seriously, I just want to keep honing on this. This is even if you help people on an array of issues as a general life coach in a really broad way.

I’ll do another example. Humans. If you help all the humans, we all have the same problems. What are our problems? We don’t have awareness for our own thoughts and feelings, and we think other people cause our thoughts and feelings and because of that, when we don’t have awareness for our own thoughts and feelings, we don’t really know who we are and what we want and how to get it.

And we’re basing all of how we feel on outside circumstances and what people say to us and what people do and how people are in the world. We don’t take responsibility for our life and our results because we don’t know the power our minds and our emotions play in the actions we take and the decisions we make and the results we create.

We have zero failure tolerance: none. We are so wrapped up in trying to feel safe from other people’s approval that we live our entire lives based on what other people think. Actually, based mostly on what we think other people think. We don’t even know what their actual thoughts are. We just make them up and then we try to get their approval from what we think that they want.

We literally try to people please to survive, which means we lie to everyone, even to ourselves. We have a low standard as humans for success and what’s possible. We spend most of our time with people who don’t want that we want, so not having what we want always feels okay and normal because nobody else does either.

Our brains are wired to steer us away from anything that makes us uncomfortable and is outside of the norm because it considers it dangerous. And we are conditioned to spend our money on things instead of emotional health. And we are often taught that it’s not socially acceptable to need emotional help and there’s something wrong with you if we do and we’re so very hush-hush about it, so most people don’t seek it.

So, they never create what they want, mostly because they don’t know what they want because they’re too busy wanting what they think they should want based on other people. And then, when they feel unsatisfied with that, they shove their feelings down. We shove our feelings down with shopping, food, TV, the internet, sex.

And if someone dares try and break the cycle and get help, most likely their friends or family will unintentionally be like a group of crabs stuck in a net with one crab climbing to the top and pull them back down, so they never leave.

To achieve something great, you have to learn what your thoughts are, who you are. You have to learn to feel every emotion, regardless of what’s happening with other people. You have to create feelings on purpose. You have to learn to believe new things and let go of old beliefs.

You have to differentiate between other people’s opinions and your own. you have to be willing to be different. Declare what you really want. Work endlessly in massive action to get it. Grow your failure tolerance. Prepare for other people to disagree or feel uncomfortable or even unhappy with you and your life changes and still move forward. Spend time with people who also want what you want.

I could go on and on. It’s okay for it to be a little broad. You have to spend time with people who also want the things that you want, and you have to be able to feel discomfort if people are unhappy with you or disagree with you and still move forward.

It doesn’t have to be super-specific if you’re not coaching on something specific. But you can break the process down. It works for everything. I do this several times in all of the bridging the gap trainings inside 2K. I break this down over and over. But you have to be willing to practice it. The more you practice it, the more you will unravel it and it will make sense.

“Oh, this is how I break it down. Oh, this is how I say it.” You will literally get to the point where you will be listening to a client on a consult, you’ll be hearing what they’re saying, and your brain will start organizing it into a process. That’s what will eventually happen, especially of you join 2K, you go through the process, and you work it over and over and over and over. That’s literally what will happen in your brain.

You will just start compartmentalizing things into a process, right? This goes in this process, this process, this process. You’re going to need this. So, even if you did custom processes every single time with every single client, that’s’ what I did, is I coached all kinds of people.

So, I got really good from the get-go, my first year of coaching, of listening to all the things and just figuring out how to break that down into a process. How to say, “Okay, this is the problem. This is what you will need to solve it.” You have to be willing to practice this; get really, really good.

And then finally, your process has to have those measurable results. And measurable results can happen even if you sell confidence. Even if you sell being sure of yourself, as you just heard me read to my client, even if that was the most ambiguous result, “I just want to feel sure of myself.”

A measurable result can be how you handle things, how you experience things, how you engage or don’t engage with other people. It’s any way that you can have an awareness that a shift has been made.

So, I’ve talked about on the podcast that something I’ve been working on really for years, but it’s like, it really feels like it’s leaving my body now. Actually leaving my body is the belief that when bad things happen – it’s like victim mentality but the next level of it, of extreme painful suffering victim mentality. When something bad happens and you’re like, “Yep, this always happens to just me. I get shit on in the world. The universe, God hates me.” When you have that level of victim mentality.

I’ve been working on this a lot in my life and I recently had something else – I talked about the Cabo story and three days to travel, things like that. So, I recently had something happen to me and it was really far from what I expected to experience and really awful. Like, I’ve told a couple of people this story and they’re like, “Oh my god, that happened?” Like, I even didn’t believe it was possible to have interactions with humans the way that they did.

And yet again, for like the third time in a row where something major like this has happened to me, I didn’t go to that place. Yes, it was still awful. Yes, I cried a lot. Yes, I experienced a lot of negative emotion. But I didn’t take it to the next level of, “This is the universe shitting on me.” I think one of my friends said, “I’m being smited…” is that the word?

It’s like, I didn’t take it to that level. So, the emotion left much quicker. I was able to get on with my day much faster. And for me, I was talking to my friends about it like, it was such an indicator how – it still took me several hours to get through it. But how fast I moved through it was such an indicator to me that the coaching I’m doing with my coach every week is working.

We are having massive progress because I normally would have let that ruin everything and I would have still been carrying the belief that I’m being smited or the universe or God hates me, and this is just another example. I would have been carrying that heaviness with me, and I really wasn’t.

Like, I remember thinking, “Yep, it was a shitty circumstance, but here we are. It happens in the world. They’re available for us and I’m just in one right now. And I get to choose to get out of it and move onto the next thing. I don’t have to make it ruin everything.” So, it was such a big piece for me.

So, you have to find those for your clients. You have to know what those are so not only you can present it to them, like this is how you’ll know, but also so you can be looking for it if they’re in their coaching with you and you can find out, “Listen, I just want to show you…” I did this all of the time. I would always anchor – just giving you a little extra here for this episode.

I would always anchor, like, I did year-long coaching, and I would anchor all of the time all of the results that they were getting. Because often, we don’t see the change happen in us so subtly. So, we need someone. That’s part of the coaching, to point that out.

So, I’d be like, “Listen, I just want to tell you…” and my coach does this for me, “I just want to tell you, six months ago, you would have done this and reacted this way and had this experience. Do you see how different you’re handling this right now? Your experience is this and you’re showing up like this and you’re telling me this and this is the experience. I just want to show you. You may not see it, but wow, this is profoundly different than six months ago, or three months ago.”

I love pointing out to my clients these little markers of success. I’ve talked about this on the podcast even for you, when you have to track your progress. You have to create a track record of success and part of that is you finding the moments to give yourself credit that you are different than you were before.

That’s the same thing you’re doing for your client. You have to always know, what are their measurements? And be looking for that, not just in the sales conversation, but in the relationship with your client.

So, you need to be able to describe specifically what those micro-shifts will be and how your clients will experience life after working with you and really understanding the process.

So, we start this work in 2K and we take it to the next level in 200K. But I want to offer that if you are brand new to this, you will want to join 2K for 2K because I really go through and give you so much practice with this, so many ways to find your process for you and ways to walk your client through this. I want it to become something your mind just does as its habit.

And I also give you tools to find out what their main issues are quickly on a call so that you have time to think this through and clearly articulate your process.

We really dedicate an extensive amount of time and support to this because there are only two things that make you money in the beginning. Your mindset, how you feel about yourself as a coach, your belief in yourself, and your skillset of selling the process of coaching. That is it. And we work on both and your confidence to deliver this, which is also part of mindset.

And like anything – I’m going to leave you with this. Like anything, you have to be willing to be bad to get good at it. this is where evaluating comes in. Evaluating your own results will show you what part of your process that you are struggling with and evaluating your consults for what parts you aren’t explaining clearly – you will know on a call, if you take the time to break it down afterwards, where you weren’t fluent; let’s say that. I love that word.

You can tell, if you’ve ever learned to speak a second language, you know where you’re getting stuck and where you aren’t fluent. Where you aren’t fluent in showing a client exactly what their problem is and the process that will take them to the result they want and how they know they are there.

If you’re not fluent, you sit down and take the time to review your consult, which is what we do in 2K, every single day, teach you a very specific process, you will be able to identify where were the language barriers, where did you get stuck? And then you work on them. That’s exactly how I got really good at consults.

It will be obvious. Most people just don’t laser in on the specific moments of past calls because they’re too busy hustling to try to get to the next call. And I might add, they’re too busy hustling to get to that next call where, if they don’t evaluate, they will do the exact same thing they did on the last call.

That’s how you get into consult purgatory. You get in a cycle of doing and thinking without evaluating and coaching and changing things up. It’s the only way it happens.

So, I really want you to take the time this week to sit down and think about what your process is. If you are in the Higher Converting Consults class, we’re going to do this together. And you’re going to have lots of time to really get to work on it.

And join 2K so that we can do this and work on it until your brain just starts predicting what your client’s problem will be and what the process to get there will be and you’re categorizing things into processes because you’re so used to selling coaching in this way. And the better you get at it, the more money you’re going to make because the safer your clients will feel going across that bridge.

That’s what your number one job is as a coach. Your number one job when you start out and until you get proficient in this, meaning you are making hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars, your number one job is to imagine your client on that cliff wanting to get to the other side, being very clear what that other side is, and very clear about the planks that have to go in that bridge to safely get them across.

Have a great, amazing week, y’all. I love you all so much. I’ll talk to you next week.

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.