Ep #228: Selling Intangible 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 228. I have a really good episode for you today. We’re going to talk about those of you that sell more of the intangible results of coaching. You might sell feeling more confident or feeling better. We’re going to talk about how to sell that better, if you’re a general life coach, how to sell that better. But first I have to tell you guys, the most amazing story.

So I was on stage at 200K Mastermind a few rounds ago in Orlando. And I was talking to the audience about money and dreaming big for the things that they might want in their lives. And I was telling them, I have accomplished so many of my own things that now it’s about my husband and wanting to see his dreams come true. And in our wedding vows, that’s one of the things I told him is that his dreams will always be as important as my own to me. And so I really go to work to figure out how to make those dreams possible for him.

And one of the dreams that I talked about is that I wanted to figure out how to get him to the Masters. So if you follow golf, the Masters is the creme de la creme of tournaments. It’s the ultimate tournament to get to go to and it’s extraordinarily difficult to get in. And I don’t even really know the process, I just know there is a lottery, I think, or an application process, or something. My husband’s best friend, Ben, had applied for 20 years in a row and never gotten tickets. And I was looking into ways to figure out how to get him tickets.

That was on my vision board, my goal is I wanted to get him tickets. And so I just talked about that as an example and I had the whole room dream up all of the things that they would do with their money for themselves or their loved ones that would really anchor and excite them when it comes to the really hard work of business. Giving them something to be excited about and to fuel and to dream. And we explored different ways they could start making those things happen now.

Well, listen, the next day I was getting breakfast and my husband was, it was a buffet so he had already gotten his food and was with the baby and I was getting mine. And my COO, Michelle, approached me and handed me a note from one of my students who is a member of Augusta and offered to take my husband and a friend to the Masters. I’m going to try not to get emotional but it’s already happening. And I just burst into tears, what? What on Earth? And it was just the sweetest most beautiful note.

And so I told my husband, I was like, “Oh my God, do I surprise him, do I not tell him right away?” And then I was like, “No, I can’t hold it in.” I told him, he was so blown away. Now, I’m not going to lie, I secretly hoped he was going to take me. However, I knew he needed to take his friend, Ben, because he had always said, “If I get to go to the Masters, I really want to take Ben.” So he took his friend Ben. He was his best man at his wedding. And my client took them, she helped them arrange all of the travel and then she didn’t just give them a ticket to the Masters. She took them to the Masters.

And because she’s a member, she got to drive them up Magnolia Lane, get them into all of the members only areas. So he got to see the trophy room. And he got to have breakfast in the members only clubhouse on a balcony overlooking the course with Jack Nicklaus, the most famous golfer of all time sitting two tables away eating with his family. He was waiting at one time by a golf cart next to Dwyane Wade. Just the craziest most incredible experience of his life. He got to watch all of his favorite golfers. He got to see Tiger play, which was really important to him.

And he just had the most incredible time of his life. It just made him and his friend’s whole life, greatest day. And he brought back my son some cute little onesies and this little baby putter. And now they practice putting every night in Jackson’s room. It’s the cutest thing, Jackson loves it. So we already have a baby golfer. But I had to just thank my client on the podcast and just say how blown away I am at that level of generosity and how much it meant to our whole family.

And I mean I’ve told so many people about this story as if I was there, as if it happened to me because I take so much joy in that and just it really has been so incredible to think that my coaching business put that into motion. And we were recently in Miami, we met a couple there and Neil was telling them about the Masters. And they were just asking, “Oh my God, how did you get tickets?” And Neil just pointed at me and he was like, “That girl.” And he was like, “My wife, my wife, my wife.”

And so I got to tell the story to them about how I had this client who offered to take him to the Masters. So I just have to thank my client, Tara Simkins, thank you so much. You are just the most generous person ever. My husband had so much fun. We have been just giddy talking about it ever since. And I am taking a lot of great joy in telling people his experience and what he got to do at the Masters, so thank you so much.

Now, listen, for everyone listening, I had Neil ask Tara if it was okay to publicly thank her on the podcast because I know it’s a big deal. Probably you want to if you’re a member of Augusta, you probably want that to be a little bit quiet. So I’m going to ask all of you to please not reach out to her and ask her to take you to the Masters. Don’t tell her that your husband really wants to go the Masters. Don’t do any of that, please, that is my only request. It was such a generous gift and generous offering and I want to honor that and just thank her and tell everyone about that experience.

And it just really meant a lot to me and I wanted to share that with you all, just one of the intangible things about helping other people and being a life coach and the people you meet in this journey. I have the most incredible clients. It blows my mind the people that I’ve had the opportunity to just connect with and to talk to. So many of my clients are pediatricians. When I was pregnant, I picked the brain of Priyanka Venugopal, one of my clients who was an OB/GYN-turned-life-coach. And I have several pediatrician clients. And so I will reach out to them and ask them questions.

And there are several doctors in my community who have been really, really sweet and great that I’ve been able to reach out and ask for help in certain situations and circumstances. And so I just I think it’s really awesome, the people that I get to be in touch with and the hearts that they have and the connections that we all make. And I just feel really, really, really grateful for my husband being able to have this experience. So, thank you, Tara from the bottom of my heart.

Okay, so now we’re going to dive into selling intangible results. So let’s start with a couple examples of tangible results that some of you might sell. You might sell making money, losing weight, finding a partner, stopping overeating, stopping binging, stopping dieting, getting a promotion, starting a business, building a funnel, running Facebook Ads. I think this could be really both intangible and tangible. But I think even if you teach overcoming grief, if you’re a grief coach, that’s still kind of a tangible result that you help someone through grief. It’s a very specific thing.

But many of you might be general life coaches and you might offer intangible results, feeling better, having more confidence, having a better relationship with yourself, knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to make decisions and to match those decisions with the life you actually want to be living, that is most authentic for you. You might offer to help people stop people pleasing and only say yes when you mean it, to work hard without burning out, to be more present.

There is a major coach in the industry, I don’t know that she would call herself that, but she teaches people to love what is. Her name is Byron Katie. So there are a lot of people who offer a lot of intangible things. I’m sure there are even a lot more better examples. So I encourage you to think about if this is you, do you offer an intangible result, what is that intangible result? And it can be really simple, just like exactly how I said them, just whatever it is, it doesn’t need to be catchy, just what it is.

So if you are selling an intangible result, here is what I often hear from you. So let me just give you some background really quick. I launched a new offer. It’s only available for my 2K for 2K students who have made their money back. But I launched a group called the 25K group. It’s the fast track to the 200K Mastermind. So I was thinking about my students who are in 2K for 2K who have made their money back, who really want to get into the 200K Mastermind and it feels like a big leap for them.

And many times people were telling me all the time, “I hope to be in there next year. I hope to be in there two years from now. My goal is by 2025.” And they were telling me these just extraordinarily long time periods. Or on the alternative, I was seeing lots of my students who would say, “On next round, next round.” And then they would always be posting, “Oh my God, it’s only two months away.” Or, “Oh my God, enrollment’s next week and I thought I would be further along.”

And so they’re making money but they’re just struggling to bridge that gap into the 200K Mastermind either to make the 25K requirements or to have enough money to pay in full for that Mastermind at $25,000. So I launched this group. And I’m really helping them build their self-confidence and their self-belief as coaches, as entrepreneurs and as salespeople and in what they sell. And so we spend a lot of time working on their thoughts about their offer and believing that people demand their offer and being able to communicate that in a really confident way.

And I was coaching someone recently and she was telling me, “I’m confused. I don’t know what I offer. I don’t know specifically how I help people, I just feel like I’m all over the place. It’s not clear. I am helping so many people with so many different results and it just feels like I never know what to say in my marketing and I don’t know exactly what I do.” And I hear that a lot from coaches who are at this level, if you’re trying to make your first 2K or even when you’re trying to go from 2K to 50K for example. That is a common thing I hear especially if you offer intangible results.

And I want to offer that the problem isn’t that you are confused, that you aren’t clear enough, that it’s difficult to explain. The problem is you don’t believe it’s enough. So I want to give you five questions to answer to develop your belief in selling an intangible result. Okay, here they are.

Number one, what is the intangible result you offer if you were telling it just to me? So one of the things we did is I did a call where people were telling me what they did. And I would ask them. “Why is that not enough, the way you’ve just said to me as your coach? “ Because the way they’re saying it to me as their coach, they’re in their kind of student mind and they’re relaying the most honest truthful way that they would say it because they’re not thinking about filtering themselves for their clients or for their audience. They’re not thinking of selling in that moment.

They’re thinking of getting help from me in that moment. And so there’s just a filter that gets removed when they explain it to me. So I always tell them, “What if the way you would say it just to me is the thing to sell? What if that was enough?” So the first question is, again, what is the intangible result that you offer if you were just telling me? Or if that freaks you out, if you were just telling a colleague or a peer or a friend, if you were just telling someone without the filter of selling it, without thinking about how to sell it, just what is the result you offer? Okay, so that’s question one.

And then number two is why is it valuable, just the way you said it, why is that valuable? And I’m going to give you some examples, but why is that valuable? Number three, how will it change your clients day-to-day? How will it change their experience of their life? How will it change their future? Number four, why is it worth what you are charging someone? So if you’re charging $2,000, $5,000, $10,000, it doesn’t matter. No matter what you’re charging, why is that intangible thing worth that amount?

And then number five is why is it enough to offer someone that? And you can even put one and five together. So what is the intangible result you offer if you were just telling me or a peer or a colleague, whoever, a friend. And why is that enough? Then you could even put a couple of them together.

What is the intangible result that you offer if you were just telling me, why is that enough to charge someone what you are charging? Why is it valuable for that amount of money? And what value exchange will they get? How is it going to change their day-to-day, their experience of their life, their future? How will it impact them? What’s the value they’re going to receive? Those simple questions are really profound and will deeply impact your selling.

So the client I was coaching in my 25K group said, “I’m helping all of my clients with a bunch of different things.” And she said it as if it was a bad thing because of course, her belief was, I’m all over the place. I’m not clear. I don’t really know exactly what I offer and it’s not easy to explain it to people.” And I told her, “What if your belief and your self-confidence in your offer was, oh my God, I have all these different examples of how I can help people. I’m not all over the place, I have tons of examples. This is a benefit. It’s a good thing.”

I can never run out of ways to explain how coaching can help people because I have all these different examples. Your self-concept, your self-belief, your self-confidence around this intangible result you offer, the way, exact way you would say it in just layman terms and the way you would say it is enough to sell it to someone. This is a good thing. And what if you had a higher belief in that? What if self-confidence was enough? I was telling them, I said, “Did you all know, I have a friend who makes millions of dollars selling self-confidence to feminists?” Her name is Kara Loewentheil.

And then I said, this was a really good one, so the client I was coaching, she had told me, we had written down five different examples of ways that she helps people that are all very different and she’s a general life coach. And I said, “Did you know that there is a general life coach making $50 million, helping people lose weight, make money, be better entrepreneurs, have better relationships, stop overeating, stop overdrinking?” And I just started naming more and more things, have better self-confidence.

I said, “Her name is Brooke Castillo. She has a program called Get Coached that makes millions of dollars.” I think the only difference is she’s not telling herself, I am helping all my clients with all these different things and it’s a problem. She’s like, all of these different things are important and people need these things desperately, Feeling Better. She has a program, I think, called Feeling Better. She has one called How To Be Interesting inside Get Coached. So good.

These are intangible things. People want to learn how to be interesting. People want to learn how to feel better. That’s her thought, I’m sure of it. I don’t know, but I’m just sure that her thought is, people want this. People want these intangible things. It’s a good thing that I offer all of these things to all of these people. I help them with all of their problems in life. I help them solve any problem. And that’s a benefit.

It was really funny, so for everything that people would be so confused about how they sell, I would offer them someone who was selling it making millions of dollars. I challenged my 25K group to go out and find that. If you are teaching something that you think is intangible, that’s not good enough, go out and look to find someone. There is someone right now making millions of dollars offering that exact same thing. And it could be very easy to find.

The only difference is and I was telling them with my own thoughts, the only difference is the self-belief, the self-confidence behind those intangible things, the belief in the value of those intangible things. Now, I’m going to give you a second part of this exercise. If you are like my client who helps a lot of people with a lot of different things, even if you feel like your coaching, your general life coaching is too general and all over the board. Something else that could help you is to think about is there anything that you consistently teach all of them or want to teach all of them?

What inherent things to do they all need to know? What’s universal? So, for example, my coach, Brooke Castillo teaches this universal thing that every single person no matter what they want to achieve, needs to know. It’s called the model. It’s a coaching tool that will help them solve any problem, create any result and understand any unwanted result they will ever get.

So that is universal to someone who wants to stop overeating, overdrinking, someone who wants to make more money, wants to get promoted, have more self-confidence, have better relationships, find a better partner, all the things. Any possible desire that someone would have or any possible thing they want to stop doing, the model would solve. Now, you don’t have to have a sophisticated tool but you could ask yourself all of the things that you could teach anyone even if it wasn’t a topic specific thing would help them. So I’m going to give you some more layman examples.

They all might need to know how to find to know to become aware of what they’re thinking. They all might need to know how to identify how they’re feeling, what emotion is happening in their body? They might all need to know how to decide intentionally if they want to continue to think a thought and feel a certain way, and if not, how to change it. They might all need to know how to feel their emotions rather than resist them or push them down or escape them. They might want to know how to ask good questions of themselves and how to make better decisions.

They might all need to know how to do what they say they’re going to do, how to honor their word. Now, listen, I’m purposely saying these things just as they come to my brain because I want you to practice believing that how you say it is enough. And that believing it’s enough and having confidence and believing that someone would want that, someone would want to learn how to honor their word and do what they’re saying, what they say they’re going to do. That someone would want that enough to pay $5,000 for it. That’s the work to becoming better at selling something intangible.

And here is what you need to know. The gold for you is that the way you explain it could be a way that no one’s ever understood it before. Just the layman way that it comes out of your mouth could be profound to someone else. It could really click for them and connect them to you. But you miss your unique way of saying something or your way that will connect to someone who needs it, you miss that when you’re telling yourself that you don’t sound as clear as you should or as clear as someone else, that someone else is saying it better.

So you have to develop your self-confidence in what you sell, not develop what you’re selling. And I see so many of my students spend time spinning in that. They try to develop what they’re selling. They try to be clearer, get their elevator pitch, their one sentence explanation, get clearer on their niche, clearer on their messaging. I’m always asking them, “What exactly do you need to be clearer with in your messaging?” What if instead of being clearer in your messaging, you need to be more confident in your messaging?

What if you need to be clearer in your own brain, more confident in your own brain, that what you say, how you say it, what you offer is enough that someone would really want that? And finally, the most important thing is you have to spend time with how the intangible results of coaching have affected your life. It’s easy for me to believe these intangible things are worth say $10,000 or even $100,000 because I am living the effects on my life.

So when someone tells me, “I help people with their self-confidence”, and they don’t think that that’s catchy enough to market, I’m like, “What? It’s everything.” When they say, “I help people feel better.” I’m like, “Yes, that’s everything.” Because everything that we spend money on in life is because of how we think it’s going to make us feel. The vacation, the house, the clothes, the concerts, the experience, anything, the food, the wine, whatever it is that we’re spending money on. The gym membership, the personal trainer, everything is so that we feel better.

Everyone wants to feel better. Everyone’s walking around not feeling good, feeling disconnected, not living intentionally the way they thought they would. So many people, I bet eight out of every 10 people you talk to says that they thought their life would be different than what it is now. So even if you were like, listen, I help, my clients are the type of people who when they look at their life now, they thought it would be different 10 years ago. When they think about where they thought they would end up. They just imagined it would be different than where they are now.

And they’re stuck on how to get out of that and how to make it the way that they thought it would be. They just don’t have an idea, a roadmap of how to do that. And I help them do that. I help them figure out what they thought their life would be and then go create it. Why isn’t that enough? Why don’t you think if you said that, that people would buy it? In my experience they do. And in my experience from my clients selling these things, people buy it. They are making money doing that, the confident ones, the ones who believe that it’s enough.

So there’s three parts to getting better at selling intangible results. The first part is that you’re going to ask yourself those five questions. What is the intangible result you offer if you were just telling me? Why is it valuable? How will it change their day-to-day, their experience of their life, their future? Why is it worth what you’re charging to someone? And why is it enough the way you say it? And then you’re also going to look for, is there anything I consistently would teach them all or could teach them all?

Because that could be something that anchors your marketing, something you talk about frequently, or help you feel like you’re cohesive. So what’s inherent that they all need to know, what’s universal? And then the third part is just asking yourself, how has the intangible pieces of coaching changed your life and served you and made you a different person than you used to be? I am a different person than I used to be. Before coaching I thought the world was against me.

I could never get ahead and not because I wasn’t believing, it was because of my own actions and thinking, but because of other people and the world. I always thought things were happening to me. I had things happening to me all the time. It was like the story of my life and I would just always talk about all my awful circumstances and then I would just create those awful circumstances happening to me over and over again with my actions and because that was my belief system.

And I had a lot of pain from the past that I was recreating in my future. I blamed a lot of behavior on my mother who doesn’t but I did a lot. And I remember reading a Byron Katie book and she asked, “Who would you be without that thought?” And from that moment on I was someone who owned my results and took credit for all of it, the good and the bad, the book stopped with me and it really freed me from a lot of pain and a lot of being someone I didn’t want to be and taking actions I didn’t want to be taking.

I remember being robbed at gunpoint in Puerto Rico. I don’t know if I’ve told this story on the podcast. But I was robbed at gunpoint on the beach right before I hired my first life coach. But I had been getting some coaching, listening to podcasts. And in that moment I realized that someone could take my life but not my experience of death. And that was the most profound intangible result that coaching ever gave me. But I had power even when someone was taking it from me.

I also learned how to stop being angry all the time. I learned how to not be spiteful to my partner. I learned how to be vulnerable. I learned how to believe that my husband is always on my side, how to respect him. And not like the stuff we’re taught about how a woman should respect a man and submit to a man. But I just didn’t in the past respect my partners. And I would push them, to see how far I could push them and then see if they would still stay. And I just don’t push Neil. I really learned that it’s truly hard to love someone deeply without respecting them.

And so Neil and I have so much respect for each other that it’s palpable to other people. We are often told that our relationship impacts other people because they see it’s real and it’s loving and it’s intimate and it’s respectful and it’s just an example of what could be possible with how you could engage with someone in a romantic relationship. I learned that through coaching. I also learned how to stop putting myself in situations that were not emotionally healthy for me. I learned to fully accept myself.

I’m really high maintenance and so is my husband and we live a highly organized life. And some people in our lives think it’s too much and they would just be anxious if they were us all the time because we just need so much organization, especially when it comes to my baby. They’re like, “Oh my God, you guys.” It’s just too much. We like his bottles to be warmed and he goes to bed every certain hours and he goes to bed in a certain way. He has a very specific routine.

And so I spent a lot of my time early on in my life being told I was high maintenance and it was bad. And Neil, was really the first person by the way who respected my maintenance. And I learned from coaching, a lot of coaching that it’s okay for me and my family and my baby to be highly organized. That that’s actually what helps us not be anxious. That actually helps us feel the most free is when we’re highly organized. And so that’s just me living my most authentic peaceful self is to be high maintenance and highly organized and it’s great for me.

And I really learned how to be living a life that works truly just like in general works best for me no matter who and how many people judge it. It’s really freeing. I do that in my business too. I run my business how it works for me and what’s best for me and not how other people think I should run it. So I’m not carrying a mental load on me from living against what I really need and want.

I was thinking about this, there are literally, I’m going to stop there, there are just too many other things to explain here. I could go on for another hour, but because I know so deeply how the intangible things affect me it’s easy for me to see their value. So then it’s easy for me to sell them. So that’s what you have to do, stop perfecting, start finding the value now in exactly what you’re offering now and how you would explain it now. Sure, it will get clearer, the more confident you get the more clearer it will be.

But the people who need you now, need more important things from you than you being clear and catchy. They don’t need that. They need you to just say what you offer, say how you help people, believe it’s enough, believe it’s valuable to them and valuable enough that they would pay you the money that you are going to receive from them, that they would pay you, that it’s worth it. And then they need you to just have belief in that and have confidence in that when you talk about it.

Otherwise you will dance around it, overcomplicate it, add a bunch of things to it. And you will get away from the simplicity. And people need simplicity to buy. They need things that are simple and clear and doable. And it’s not that what you are offering isn’t clear, it’s that you’re telling yourself it isn’t. And so then you make it not clear by adding a bunch of things to it and trying to fancy it up. You don’t need to do that. Be as layman as possible. Believe that teaching someone how to be vulnerable is enough, how to be confident is enough, all of the things.

How to honor their word is enough, how to stop procrastinating is enough, how to manage their anxiety is enough, just believing that. And then truly answering these questions for yourself will also make your marketing better. Okay, so do these three exercises and you will see a different result in your marketing and in your selling. And then join 2K for 2K, and I will walk you through how to put these things into a consult.

I specifically teach you how to take what someone says then mirror it back to them in what their problem is, how to walk them through your process of helping them, how to bridge the gap to where they want to be and how to talk through the value to them in their life. And then talk about actually making the decision to purchase this coaching that will give them an intangible thing.

And then join the 25K group and I will boost the crap out of your self-confidence and your self-belief as a coach and an entrepreneur. And get you taking more effective action consistently to get better results, but you’ve got to be in 2K for 2K to join the 25K group. Alright, I will 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.