Ep #348: MVP: Consultations as a Service

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, I wanted to share a conversation that I had with a 2k for 2k student about consultations in our Facebook community. So yes, I still pop in there, and I still answer questions that my students post in the Facebook community. I am still in there engaging every day.

Every time I make big announcements for my business, my 2k-ers are always so scared I’m going to stop selling or delivering 2k for 2k. And I don’t know what the future holds, but I was telling them that this is my core foundational program and foundational teachings that I feel like if you’re building houses, we have a house being built behind our house and so we watch them like lay the foundation. And this is what this program feels like for me. So, I feel like we’re just getting started.

So, I am very excited. I can’t believe we’ve never done this, but I’m still in that program. I’m still actively engaging every day. and I had a powerful conversation with a student recently and today’s episode is sharing that with you.

So I titled the episode Consultations as a Service for a couple of reasons, but I’m going to share what I wrote to my client that will really be the ultimate lesson of this episode. But I had a previous episode where I talked about selling a consultation as a consultation. that it doesn’t often work to get people on a free coaching call and then try to convert them into a client. If they came for a free call, they’re not expecting a consultation. And sometimes we try to jazz up a consultation by calling it a life strategy session or something that’s sexy, that we think is sexy and exciting, but from a place of not believing that consultations are sexy and exciting. From a place of not seeing the deep value of a consultation.

And not showing up and knowing ahead of time as you market and ask people to sign up for consults, that you are marketing it as one of the highest level services that you provide. That it’s something that you could easily charge $1,000 for, but you do it for free. So many places, when you go get a consultation, you actually have to pay for that consultation. It’s something that is a high service for someone that is an expert to take time to look at your life or your problem or your business or whatever it is, to look at your problem, to hear what’s going on and then offer how they could help and basically in one session, tell you how you would solve your problem. It’s highly valuable. And also, it’s an opportunity to serve the people who sign up and show them what it’s really like to be a life coach or to work with a life coach, to have a coach.

And not in a way where you’re going to coach them the whole call, but in how you show up to the consultation, in the way that you serve. So we just finished my first Entrepreneur Series course, Served, and we talked a lot about there’s the difference between doing something that is a service activity, doing a consultation, to serve people, you’re just doing it. And then there’s a difference between showing up in service to do anything. Being in service, doing from service. So doing a service versus doing from service.

So anybody, you could do a consultation all day long, but doing one from a place of deep service to your person, believing it is one of the most valuable hours of their entire life, changes the game for how the person experiences you and the profound breakthrough and transformation that’s available to them when they experience coaching for the first time. Not being coached, but they experience what it’s like to be in the presence of a coach. And I think that is the value of a consultation.

It’s your time not to coach them, and I talk about in my 2k for 2k program why you actually don’t want to coach on a consult. I also talk about this not only in the consultation modules but in my bonus program inside 2k for 2k called Higher Converting Consults. I talk about why it’s actually not good for the client and how it sends them into the wrong emotions and puts them in the wrong type of relationship with you before they’ve consented.

Coaching has a big consent component, and so it’s not about coaching on the consult, but it is about giving them an opportunity to witness being in the presence of a coach. Being in the presence of someone who is focused, engaged, listening, unbiased, holding the space, showing up for their highest version of themselves, not accepting excuses, thinking beyond obstacles, thinking outside the box, having clear direction when they feel like they’re in the weeds and lost, making things that feel difficult and complicated simple and doable. All of those things can happen without actually coaching.

That’s what I mean by giving them a taste of what it’s like to be in the presence of a coach. This is a service that you offer as a coach, the service of a consultation. I also have an episode about being a professional, showing up and thinking like a professional coach versus like a hobbyist or not seeing coaching as a professional industry, but showing up as this is the moment to give them the best example of what it’s like to be present in the presence of a coach, showing up professionally as this is an extraordinary valuable service that you offer.

And when you are in a place of service, one of the things we talked about in Served is the difference between serve energy and get energy. And where most people lose the consult and lose the sale and don’t serve their people at the absolute highest that they could on a consultation, they miss opportunities and lose moments for breakthrough and transformation, is because they slip into get energy. They start qualifying the client, qualifying the potential client on the call. From the moment they get on the call, they’re judging, are you going to be able to pay me?

And then what happens when you don’t think someone can pay you and you are judging whether or not they’re going to pay you, what you’re really judging is whether or not your time with them is going to be valuable to you. And then you start adjusting your service, your level of service accordingly. You start adjusting your effort. You start adjusting your energy. If they get on the call and they say, “Listen, I’m really interested, but funds are really tight.” Or in this case, my client, the person told her, I’m on government assistance and money is really tight. Or I’ve even had someone that got on the call and immediately said, “Listen, I can’t pay you at all. I have 16 cents in my account. But you said you do a free consultation, so I’m here.”

So if you start qualifying in the very first moments or throughout the call, whether this person is an ideal client, you’re thinking about you and you’re in get energy. And then you step out of being in service. And one of the things I offered to my students in Served is that being in service energy is as much for you as it is for other people. Because how you feel when you are serving as a professional, with the highest level of professionalism, if you are serving the way you would show up if you were a million-dollar coach, if you are serving like this is your life legacy, the way that feels to you feels amazing, regardless of whether or not people pay you.

If you haven’t had this experience yet, it doesn’t mean you won’t, but so many 2k students have had the experience of the person didn’t buy and they were like, “That was a profound experience for me. I got value from that.”

It felt amazing. I know I served that person even though they weren’t the right fit or they couldn’t afford it or they weren’t ready, whatever it was, I know I served them at the highest, and I left that call feeling amazing. I left that call feeling like I gave it my all. I laid it all on the table. And that is the way I always want to feel for me.

So if I’m going to spend 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour on a consultation, it’s going to be the highest level thing I’ve done all week because it’s my time. It’s my energy. It’s my purpose. It’s how I see myself, the world. It’s my chance to use my intellectual property. It’s my chance to hone my skills. It’s my chance to give back. It’s my chance to feel this thing that I do that is coaching. It’s my chance to be in that energy, in the alignment of being a coach. It’s my chance to be that, regardless of whether someone pays you. In fact, the more you show up as a coach without the need to get paid, the faster people are going to want to pay you.

So serving is as much for you as other people, but also I truly believe if you serve endlessly, if you keep serving continuously, it will be impossible to not get paid. Even if it’s not by that person, it will be impossible. You want to serve so much, it’s impossible for you to not get paid. So you want to serve so well on your consultations that it’s impossible that you won’t eventually get yesses. But the only way you do that is if you stop qualifying the consultation ahead of time and deciding whether or not they’re going to be your client or not, and then adjusting who you are and how you show up and what you give to them based on that.

I want to just say this before I dive in, and I read you my response. I want to say this, and I’ve said this many times on the podcast, and you’ll hear this many times in 2k for 2k. You will never, ever have me judge you for having any amount of get energy or for stepping out of any amount of service energy. You never need to experience shame if you have done these things, if you’ve accidentally qualified someone based on whether they can pay you and then adjusted your energy.

Like if you hear this episode and you’re like, “Oh my god, this is what I’m doing.” Just know, I’m loving you and I’m not shaming you or judging you. I think this is a human response, and I think that it’s an incredibly valuable skill set to be able to think beyond it. It’s an acquired skill set. It’s a worthy skill set to develop, but it does require development.

And this is one of the things when I say 2k for 2k is a foundational program, this is what I mean. The foundation of understanding what we’re doing here, the foundation of being able to sell from service energy without qualifying, without adjusting, and becoming an incredible salesperson by overriding the human mind’s tendency to be self-focused and motivated transactionally by what it thinks it can get. So this is like a superhuman skill set. And yet, it’s really teachable and very doable. And we’re coaches. We already know how to watch the mind. We already know how to get our mind to do what we want it to do. We already know how to think intentionally. So these are all skill sets you already developed. You already possess.

So just know there’s no judgment on my end. There’s no need to shame, but there’s so much money to be made, so much better feeling, and so much more energy on the other side of working through this. Okay.

So, this is what I said to the client. So she did the consult with the person who was on government assistance, and money was very tight. This person did not say, “I can’t hire you.” This person did not say, “I have no money.” We don’t know.

What happened with my client, and I’m not going to read her post because I don’t think it’s super relevant, but what happened with my client is she just made it mean this person can’t sign up for coaching, this person can’t pay coaching. I can’t even remember if she actually made an offer to this person. I think she did after the fact because she wasn’t sure what to do or where to go. And that’s what a lot of you do. You’re not trying to push someone, and you’re not rude to them, but you just kind of give up on them a little bit because you don’t know what to do. You don’t know how to handle it. So this is what I told my student that I want to offer to you.

Here’s what I said. I love being willing to get on the phone with anyone in the beginning of your business until you are booked. I will just add in here, I didn’t write this to her, but I’m not a huge fan until you are booked of applications, application fees, telling the price ahead of time, and trying to qualify unqualified people out because again, you’re qualifying. And you’re not booked. So here’s the reason. So I love being willing to get on the phone with anyone until I’m booked because I love connecting with people, understanding them and using each conversation to fuel me on my mission, to fuel me in getting better at what I do.

I also love seeing how I treat people when I believe they can’t afford me versus when I believe they can. I love watching myself with curiosity to see when I step out of service energy and start thinking about what I’m going to get or not get, and how that influences the access to insight I have in my brain in the moment. This is how I get value, whether someone signs up or not. I get the value. I want to leave knowing everything I can about them and about me. We never know what money someone has, can be resourceful to get, or will have in the future.

What we do know is that our coaching is different when we stop seeing the client as that, the client, and start seeing them as someone who’s not going to sign up for any reason. We stop serving when the service is dependent on us being able to get paid by this particular person. Versus when we see consultations are a service we offer itself and our job is to do so well with that service that people want to pay us with everything inside of them if they can and are able to. And if not, we have still done our job.

And then I went on to tell her that for this situation, as always, it’s harder to know what would have been if you didn’t have this insight going into the conversation. And since she did step out of that service place, we won’t know how this person would have ultimately responded. But this is what I continued to tell her. That’s okay because you can get just as much value in hindsight by going through and seeing what would have been different if she had never said money was tight and she was on government assistance, or if you had never made that mean anything about her desire or ability to pay you. Or you didn’t care that she couldn’t pay you and ultimately wouldn’t be a client.

One question I might have asked her is what her hope or her desire had been when booking the call. I might have said, “I hear that money is tight and you’re on government assistance. So that I know how I can assist you from here, can you tell me what you had hoped to have happen when booking this call? Do you want to hire a coach even though finances are tight?”

And if she had said, “No, I just wanted to see if you could help me on this one call,” which someone has actually said to me before, I would have said, “Great. Okay. Since I can’t engage with you ongoing, I want to give you as much as I can in our remaining time, and I’m going to be direct to save time. And I’m going to point you to resources moving forward at the end of our call. I want to make sure you’re taken care of.”

See how different that is? Because when you show up that way, at the end of that call, like I’ve had that happen to me where someone said, “I can’t pay you anything.” And I said, “All right. Well, if I only have one hour with you, I’m going to have to be super direct, very blunt, and get very straight to the point because this is the only hour I have with you and I have to make sure we use it well.”

And she was like, “Great.” And I said, “All right, let’s go.” And I left that call feeling like a boss. I left that call with so much energy. I left that call with so much conviction, so much passion, so much material to go out and talk to other people about. I left that call knowing I am a coach. I am a professional stand-up kind of lady. I am a service provider.

That’s what’s available. The feelings and the emotions are for you. That time, you could see it as wasted or you could see it as one of the best investments for your own self-concept possible. I also told her, “Think about how you would treat a call with someone who can’t pay you now but would pay you in the future. What if that were guaranteed, this person would come back and pay you?”

Or what if it were guaranteed that if you served this person 100%, what if you believed the universe or God or Spirit, whoever you believe in, sent you another person who could, because you served that person so well? They’re like, “Oh, this person isn’t ready, but I know you’re ready, so I’ll send you this person over here who is.” This will change your whole entire business and your whole entire life if you let it. And I want to offer that these are the conversations we have. This is what we talk about. This is how we’re coaching.

All right, have an amazing week. 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 five-step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to StaceyBoehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.